Ah, the lovely browns of late autumn in Minnesota. I went exploring along the Minnesota River yesterday and though I chased a woodpecker for a while, I chose this picture for today.
The high-noon sun is usually a problem for most situations, but I found a way to make it work. The high light was glancing down on this little fluff-ball giving it dimension — notice the way the stems have clear light and dark sides. Since the sun was high, the dark-brown trees were, well, dark. By using my telephoto at the widest aperture and placing the subject just inside my minimum focal distance, I was able to throw the background completely out of focus.
Depth of Field (the area in focus) is determined by three things: aperture, distance to the subject and focal length. In this case, I was maximizing all of these factors which makes for a nice Bokeh. I’ve done this before and probably will again. A good time to try this is when you have a good solid color in the background or a confusing one.
Bokeh is the light effect created by the out of focus light from the background. The quality of this effect on the image is a function of and an important distinction in the quality of the lens. For example, at some point everyone who has an SLR with interchangeable lenses discovers the 500mm mirror lens for $90 on ebay. Why is this powerful lens so cheap? It has very little glass in it and two problems: the aperture is fixed at f/8 and the bokeh looks like little donuts. Seriously, little white donuts.
That’s it for today, have fun and keep your focus!
Now that’s a creative, well composed picture. I like the subtle, low key coloration. It is close to a sepia effect. I was fooling around with that over the weekend and put a few on Flickr.
Do you know the origin of the word Bokeh?
I love this snapshot. Very nice.
[...] by the bland brown of the tree, so I made the tree monochrome. This kept the texture but lost the bland brown (which played such a critical roll in yesterday’s image). Yes, I pumped up the blue, but not much. It’s fun to play with an image in post, but you [...]
great shot! The light is perfect!
[...] talked about Bokeh recently and this is another example of that effect. The subject in the foreground is a big star [...]
[...] of 2.8 or 3.5 you can focus on something close and have the background out of focus like this, or this. With a small aperture, you can keep lots of things in focus. Today’s picture above was taken [...]
[...] the 500mm Mirror Lens I had back in May? In spite of the horrid bokeh, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I broke down and found another one on ebay. After months [...]