Early morning light

I wanted to create a picture that invokes the sense of early morning light. This can be a typical cold blue light.
To achieve this, I set my white balance to tungsten, which causes a blue color cast on the whole image. When you find the color too blue, you can compensate a bit by using white balance compensation. Reduce for less blue, increase for more blue color. In the case below I used a white balance compensation of -2.

I then used a flash to separate the foreground from the background. To achieve this, I underexposed the image with two stops. I then used a SB-800 (camera left) in wireless TTL mode to light the foreground. The flash is fully zoomed to 105mm, as this gives a more directed beam.

The flash was gelled with a CTO gel, to compensate for the tungsten white balance, so subjects in the foreground look natural.

The result is the image below.

If I had not used the tungsten white balance, the whole image would in various shades of green as this is what the park looked like at the moment I photographed it (about 11:30 in the morning). This would be a very dull picture. By setting the white balance to tungesten, I can make the green of the lillies pointing out of the water look really green by compensating with a CTO gel.