07-02-08 – Mmmm Bokeh

okay…. due to massive personal physical issues that you’d have to know me damn well to get me to talk about i’m freaking out a bit much to go roaming the country or even the depths of (panic stricken) mind for new pix, so only one these three is new. Only the lizard picture is cropped. All three are resized here “for web”. I’d love feedback as to whether I’m on the right track and also if I should post the pix a little bigger.

new:

old, cropped:

old, not cropped:

okay, i think i’m getting it… although if i understand the idea the second picture showed it, but perhaps the rocks in the background are just too subtle.

I don’t think the below is a great photo, but i thought maybe it was closer to the bokeh spirit than some of the ones above….

thanks so much for your input!! 🙂 And for sharing your album.

Yep, I agree with that: you have a subject that is in perfect focus, and then a part that isn’t in focus.

For the photo, the blue sky patch in the upper-left is a bit distracting. The background probably shouldn’t draw attention to itself.

YAY! Maybe I have something somewhere in my files that will work. Cuz I doubt I’m up to going around shooting right now.

And i totally agree about the blue sky in that picture. I wasn’t going for art that day, just on a mission to get a photograph of each and every little flower that spring had seen fit to grace my yard with. Just the way I roll. 😉

thank you!

oh, and that one was a biatch to shoot, that flower is about a quarter of an inch in diameter. 😉

I concur with Elsinore’s comment. The initial idea for this theme was, and still is, shallow depth of field. The title may be a bit misleading, but I think it is OK. As E said, the out of focus parts should add to the overall effect of the photo.

I’m pleased that this theme is pushing at least a few farktogs (myself included) to think about shallow DoF and broaden their skills.

Id say that last shot would definitely work

Just because you don’t have “circles of confusion” and out of focus orbs in your background won’t disqualify your photo.

Ok, I’m going to put a professor hat on briefly, because this term tends to get misused a little bit.

By definition, any part of an image that is out of perfect focus has circles of confusion. Every point that’s out of focus in an image is rendered as a circle, more or less (lens aberrations and the shape of the aperture have an effect on the exact shape). So, what happens in an out of focus area, is that you’re seeing all of the COCs overlapping each other (and any area which appears in focus has COCs that are small enough to be indistinguishable from a point).

You can see a rendering of the COC when you have points in the out of focus region of the image that are substantially brighter than what’s surrounding them, but the COCs are there if highlights are present or not.

I hope that makes sense, now I have to go give this hat back to a real professor… 😉