I really do love to experiment with my shooting and post-processing. For this particular scene, I knew that I wanted to focus most of the attention on the cool looking couch, and the best way to isolate was to use my tilt-shift lens wide open at f/3.5, and tilted almost completely in the opposite direction of the couch. At the same time, I also knew that I wanted to get the bricks in the ceiling on the left side of the frame in good focus. I know…can’t do that with a tilt/shift. Ahh, but you can. All you have to do is take one set of brackets with the focus on the chair, then refocus on the ceiling and blast of another set of brackets. Once I ran both sets of brackets through Photomatix Pro, I opened both resulting tonemapped images in Photoshop, one layered on top of the other. Finally, I used my Wacom table and a layer mask to paint the sharp parts I wanted of one image into the blurred out areas of my main image (main image being the one with the sharply focused couch), et voilà !
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