The story behind the image: a friend of mine has recently "come out" as transitioning from male to female. This photograph is something of an alternative illustration of that; a highly technical image portraying the female aspect dominating the male.
Tone-mapping either HDR or MDR source images is something I've found relatively easy, but my approach isn't to dial all the controls up to 11 and create something so busy with fussy detail that it hurts my eyes to look for too long. My use of tone-mapping this year has almost exclusively been to make an image which better represents what the human eye saw at the time. The eye adjusts its sensitivity depending on what it is looking at, while the camera has one exposure across the entire frame that might lose detail in shadows and highlights when displayed on a screen.
Excluding a very short spell of promotional photography at university for a dramatic production, this is the first time I have had someone stand in front of the camera with the specific aim of them being the subject of the picture. I'd not directed a model, and suddenly I had two. Practice, practice, practice!
