The Balcony People

It took me two hours in the post processing. It could have been more. I don’t remember. I loved the warmth of the original, but I had in my mind to give it a blue tint right from the start. It was shot in Manali. It is a cool place and I wanted that to be shown in the photo.

I was standing in the balcony of my room in our resort when they all appeared to say hi from their respective balconies. I didn’t have time to compose or else I would have lost the expressions. The camera was titled. Clearly I was in a hurry. It took me some time to fix that.

I blurred out some of the parts to give depth. I wanted to experiment with some bokeh. So I created a light haze from the top right. Then I went on to add some bokeh. It was my first time and I was not good with that. The results I got were nowhere near satisfactory. So I reduced the opacity to up to 40% so that they do not attract much attention.

I am a huge level freak. I like to play around with the levels in Photoshop. But this time I restrained myself. I didn’t want to lose any detail. There isn't much contrast in the picture and I preserved the details of the hair as far as I could. The shot could have been sharper. Wish I had used Manual mode!