Shadow-catching seems to do the trick. Looks like i have a new toy to play around with =P The possibilities with this and photoshop look endless! It looks like i can even fake a depth of field on the background by intentionally leaving the focal lenses at something higher.

Is there a place where i can find some decent free HDR or even LDR files for backgrounds and skies? And for LDR files, what image resolution and size should i be looking for?

And one other thing i noticed. Here is a test render with the focal at 30mm. Michael 4 looks good in here, but the background is a bit blurred. So i decreased the focal to 15mm, as shown on the second post. The background looks good here, but michael looks a bit weird at this focal. Is there a way to fix this?