I was walking down the hill in Carpathian mountains, disappointed. There was a promising amount of mist all the way up few hours ago, which unfortunately turned to lie higher than expected and I had made no single exposure from the viewpoint on Vysoka hill. The sunrise had not helped so I decided to leave the spot shotless and get back to the car. On the way, I was trying to look around in search for a cleaner piece of ground in the woodland to try to photograph misty young beech forest. With not much luck as I found everything too dirty for was I had in mind. I could have removed some of the mess off my composition but there were way too many relics of trees all over while sceneries did not seem to justify an extra effort. Soon I gave up searching and took an easy fix - decided to exclude the ground from the frame. I used a longer lens attempting to create a rhythm with lines of tree trunks, and in hopes for some interesting interpretation of mist by unfiltered Velvia.

*Title: Blue Essesnce, Camera: Hasselblad H1, Lens: 210mm, Film: Fuji Velvia, Filters: no, Exposure: Unrecorded*

At a first glance, the slide did not look too impressive so I forgot about it until recently when I realized that the palette of soft blue hues could have an impact. I played a little with various crops to get what I initially planned for. In the post-process, I made the image softer using the technique called Orton effect (named after Michael Orton who invented it - some years ago I read Darwin Wiggett's article about it, I can't find the original version but look here for details). In principle, I sandwiched two images, one sharp and one blurred a little with gaussian blur filter, and fine-tuned the opacity of the blurred layer until I achieved satisfying feel of the final image. Trunks now seem to be not so heavy and crisp refining the mood of the photograph.