Before and After of Winter Solstice

This was one of those times that I really wanted to shoot something but didn't know what exactly, but I did know I wanted a portrait with an over exposed background. So I set up my camera on a couple pillows (very professional), had a flash fire through an umbrella to my left with a shutter speed of 1/2 and ISO at 200. After a few shots I was satisfied with one I knew I could work with:

Like I said, I wanted an over exposed background but there was still clutter in the background. It's a simple clean up, just pick up the dodge tool, set it on midtones and that solved things pretty quickly.

So I finally had my over exposed photo, but there was nothing really visually compelling or interesting. I start to play around with the coloring and dodging my face a bit. I also move myself to be more in the center of the photo.

I finally start to get something going, but still has something missing. The photo was turning into something that reminded me of winter, so I went to deviantart and searched for a stock photo of ice/snow/trees, anything that can work with this photo and, rather quickly, found the perfect image:

I placed this on top of my image, put it in darken in the layers box, and put the opacity to around 16. I found it worked rather well, but it looked a bit amateur, looking like I just placed myself into a lake and forest. After looking at it a bit more and getting a bit frustrated, I decided to blur the background image and found it worked really well with this photo. The effect it gave was that the camera was taking the photo through a window.

Then I just played a bit more with curves/diffuse glow/selective coloring/dodge/flipped it and voila!

 All in all it took about 30-45 minutes. I love when an impromptu photoshoot turns out for the best, instead of stashed away in a folder I'll never see again. :P