You Must Try This at Home....

I was playing around the other night with bokeh after I finally put up my Christmas Tree.  The December challenge from my photography group was to do some creative things with bokeh.  In photography bokeh is the "blur" or out of focus image you see in some photography like this picture here taken at our State fair back in September.  Notice how the focus is on the game attendant and background is out of focus?   That my friends is bokeh.

  or this one of some hats at a vendors booth

Notice how I focused in 1/2 way on the middle hats and everything to the front and back of the focused object is blurred...bokeh! 

Well when you use lights in the background things really start to get cool!  My first attempt was so so.  I realized after taking the pictures that I should have used a faster lens with a larger apeture, but I'll be going back for round two before I take the tree down and hopefully have some more creative bokeh to show you, that's not as accidental as the next images coming up.   

The first shot was pretty normal. I placed the playground subjects about 4 feet in front of the tree and I was about 2 feet from the subject. With camera set to f/5.6 at 55 mm focal length this is what I got.  Ideally, I should have used a lower f-stop of 1.8, that would have rendered a better out of focus and sharper image. 

  

 As you'll see next, I got a little bored and remembered something cool  I learned from Bryan Peterson, so I started wondering "what would happen if I did this?". For this next shot, I moved the camera in a circular motion as I pressed the shutter button.."well cool"...

so I tried something else.....

Talk about a hot playground kiss!  For this one, I manually adjusted the lense out as I pressed the shutter button..."wow"! Needless to say, I guess you can imagine this went on for a while, just to see how many cool things I could really do!  Doesn't take much to entertain me as you can see. 

Lesson Learned:

Next time I practice, I'm going to try my faster lense. I think I'll get better background blur and maybe won't have to use my flash.  Second lesson learned is...I must try this camera and lens moving thingy on something else!! 

Unveiling in bokeh,

Dee