AOP part 13: Coloured Gels - Different Gel
After playing with the blue gel creating the red environment I wanted to switch to a cooler, cinematic tone. This required switching to a more gentle orange gel and resetting the white balance and exposure balance.
This tonal range is widely used in cinema and frankly ought to be used more often in photography. Essentially you have warm skin tones against a blue shifted background.
This has the effect of pushing the subject forward in the frame, making them much stronger. Meanwhile the background recedes back in the frame, losing it's dominance.
For this reason the classic pale blue background has been used in portraiture since photography began.
It has a side benefit too, by reducing the tonal range in the background it effectively simplifies the background. Here I had set the scene to be deliberately cluttered to create a sense of environment, but at the same time I did not want the location details clashing with my principal subject.
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