You are most certainly wandering what is so special about this photo. Yes, most certainly I like taking photos with existing light, without the help of anything artificial. With only a rare exception here, where I used Lumix GH1's built in flesh to fill in the subject, without turning the background too dark.

The most photographers, that deal with fashion or portrait photography, like to get that distinct blurred background, that you can see in many magazines. Blurred background simply makes the person in the photograph stand out better. Unfortunately, background blur is directly proportional to the focal length, the maximum aperture size and the size of the sensor. And yes, we just mentioned three of three things that make professional camera equipment so expensive. For a lens that can pull off a descent blurred background we are talking $2,000 to $3,000 minimum. And on the top of that, when you have Panasonic's Lumix GH1, than there is actually no such lens in their range of Micro Four Thirds lenses. Plus, however big is Lumix GH1's sensor, it is still not big enough relative to its telephoto lens' focal lenght to produce a good blur.

Fortunatelly, there is a software solution to the background blur dilema. Photoshop has just the filter that we want, the Gaussian Blur and not that we can get the same result as with $2,000 lens, we can do one better, we can control how much blur we want!

Ok, I do not have time to create step by step instructions, but if you were smart to memorize all those Lumix GH1 instructions from the manual, this is going to be just a breeze. Whole Photoshop blur process consists of just three or four steps. Here we go:

1. First select the background, with Magic Wand, the selection tool that enables you to select irregular shapes.
2. In the top menu select: Filter / Feather and set the feathering of the selection to something like 2 pixels. You can vary it a bit here, it is just that 2pix selection edge blur was fine for this picture.
3. You can possibly save the selection here, just because it takes so long to go around those clothes creases and hear curls. Use top menu: Select / Save Selection ... etc. You'll have something like this:

1. (actually item 4.) Now, make sure that the background is selected and that selection is active and go for top menu item: Filter / Blur / Gaussian Blur ... There you can choose the amount of Gaussian Blur that you want to apply. The next photograph was done with blur set to 4.4: