DoF and cherry trees

Looking up!

Wow!  What a glorious day today!!  I can remember a long long time ago when I was a youngster that I'd lie on my back on the grass and jus look up and watch the clouds.  I can remember there being lots of clouds in the UK when I'd look up, but today, here in GodZone New Zealand, we're pretty cloud free just now.  The sun is out, feels lovely and warm.  The cherry blossom is out and the tuis and silver eyes are feasting on the nectar.  Summer is on its way at last!

If you look to the left of the first image in this post you'll notice the pink blossom of a cherry tree.  I thought it'd be quite noce to get a shot of these flowers with a blurry background mixture of the sky and other blooms.  I put my camera on a tripod with an 85mm lens attached and took three shots at different apertures.  A couple of things intrigued me.  Firstly there's a significant difference in sharpness of the  "focussed" blooms when you compare the f1.4 and f4 shots.  Makes me wonder if I need to fine tune the autofocus!  Secondly there really is a big difference in background blur, or bokeh, as you open up the lens.  There's much more difference between f1.4 and f2.8 than I was expecting.

Oh well, such a lovely day today I'd better get out and enjoy it!!

85mm f4

85mm f2.8

85mm f1.4

85@85

A new blog!  Perhaps you can remember a couple of years ago I took 50 shots on 50 consecutive days with a 50mm lens?  The project was called 505050 and there was a blog created so folks could keep track of my progress, offer constructive criticism and encouragement.

Very shallow depth of field from the 85mm lens.

Just recently I was fortunate to become the owner of a rather nice 85mm lens.  I obtained the lens really for portrait work, but perhaps I can use it for other things too?  What better way to get to know the lens than to use it in anger for 85 days?  Please take a look at the new blog, let me know what you think of the shots and, as 85 days is a long time, perhaps offer a little encouragement as I take my shots.  It'd be lovely to see your comments on the blog.  Where is it?  Check out http://85at85.blogspot.com/

Front yard Fuchsias.

Front yard fuchsia.

We seem to have rather a lot of these fuchsias in our front yard.  They're not particularly dramatic as some of the other fuchsias we have, but they're rather pretty all the same.  I thought I'd try a few shots with a longish focal length (somewhere in the order of 200mm) and a shallow depth of field to see what type of shot I could get.  I was particularly interested to see how my lens would behave with the bright highlights in the background.  Would I get a nice even blur, or would I get lots of bright circular highlights?

The first shot has some quite bright highlights, but pleasantly displayed as circles.  Shooting into the sun gives a nice "halo" effect on some parts of the buds and flowers.  Compare this with the fourth shot in this post where your eyes are somewhat overwhelmed by the background highlights that it's hard to notice the fuchsia blooms!

The second shot in this post has some more fuchsia blooms in the right of the image, but with a shallow depth of field these have become confusingly blurred.  Looks rather smudged and really detracts from the pretty flower to the left centre of the shot.  As I look at this image I keep being drawn to the smudge of colour to the right of the image.

The third shot has a less confusing background blur (bokeh).  Perhaps not as smooth as I might like, but certainly beter than that in image 2.  Perhaps let me know what you think?

Fuchsias with interesting bokeh effect on image right.

Fuchsias again with a less distracting bokeh.

Confused background?  Lots of bright highlights distract from the fuchsia blooms.

Caught in the rain

Walking off to the Botanic Gardens was seen as a way to clear my head.  I keep suffering from headaches, so a gentle stroll off to the Gardens was considered a possible remedy.  A bit of fresh air, some gentle exercise ... Sadly it hasn't worked, but I managed a few photos I thought you might like.

The first shot was taken outside the Visitor Centre at Auckland's Botanic Gardens.  As you approach the visitor centre there's three "manufactured" palm to the left of the entrance that you can see in the image above.  On the right of the entrance there's some natural palms.  Quite a nice contrast, but today I was quite taken with the man made palms.  Steely blue came to mind, hence the tones and colours you seen in the image.  I left the more curvy twiggy bits top right to support the curvy contrast of the wall.  Perhaps let me now what you think of the image.

Second shot in this post was taken in the herb garden.  I was playing with my 50mm lens and enjoying the shallow depth of field achievable when the lens is opened up a bit.  I'm not sure what the flower is, bit it seemed quite pretty.  I wanted to get the small blooms in focus on a diagonal but get a buttery bokeh effect of some greens behind the flowers.  Lightroom was used to pull back the white flowers.  Quite a bit of contrast in this shot and I wanted detail in each of the flowers without making the background too dark.  A pleasing image?  Perhaps let me know what you think.

Something you may have noticed that intrigues me is the way rain drops sit on foliage.  During today;s walk I was really spoilt for choice as I got caught in a rain shower.  There was rain drops everywhere!  Anyway, a couple of my favourite shots from today are images three and four in this post.

Blur?

Whilst at Karaka I took some shots of the weeds backlit by the sunlight.  I really liked the halo effect around the stems and the way the little hairs were illuminated.  I did not, however, manage to get a pleasing exposure with just the one image.  I could see the effect I was after, but the light on the weeds wasn't just right.

Three exposures of the weeds and an HDR blend led to the next image which introduced more depth and colour to the weed flowers, but introduced some rather disturbing bokeh in the background.  If you look at the first image you can make out some unpleasant circular hightlights, but these are amplified in the HDR process as is seen in the second image.

Final step was to add a bit of Gaussian blur to the background to enhance the blur.  This is what you see in the final image in this post.

So, after all this effort, was it worth it?  Perhaps not!  The first image looks pretty good really doesn't it?  What do you think?  Any preference or suggestions?

Bizzy Bokeh

BizzyBokeh, originally uploaded by nzcjs.

It's Christmas and I was quite pleased with my previous Christmas bokeh attempt. I wanted to try some different cutouts, so sent wifey off to the shops to get some nice black card and then raided my daughter's scrapbooking tools. I found a rather nice snowflake punch.

I used the Canon Photo5 bokeh hood as a template, then created a new cutout from my daughter's punch. The light is all wrong for doing the Christmas tree, but there was some nice light coming through the trees in the back yard. Desperate to try out my new hood I set off without tripod in an attempt to get a shot.

Auto-focus gets very confused with the hood over the lens and with the lens wide open focussing became a challenge ... especially as I was in an awkward position to get some nice highlights. Focus is on the rightmost flower, and as the depth of field is so shallow that's about the only thing that is vaguely focussed. The highlights haven't come out too bad though. Just waiting for it to go dark now then I can play with the lights on the tree.

I didn't post this for any other reason than to encourage whoever reads this to have a go with different shaped cutouts in a bokeh good.  Great fun and you can get some quite lovely effects.

Just for fun I took another bokeh image from the backyard and then had a bit of a play with hdr.  What do you think?

Christmas nutcracker

Christmas nutcracker, originally uploaded by nzcjs.

A 50mm lens that opens quite wide and lots of lights on the Christmas tree was inspiration to play with Bokeh hoods again. One of the decorations, a soldier nutcracker, was selected as a foreground subject and the camera mounted on the tripod (which really needs updating! It's a cheap Bilora model but it cost me a fortune back in 1979 when I bought it in Amman, Jordan).

I needed the lights to be out of focus, so a shallow depth of field was selected (lens wide open) and then focussed on the soldier with him as close as possible to the lens (this made the depth of field even shallower). A couple of shots were then tried to see if the lights came out as stars, which they did, but the soldier was not illuminated very well.

As I'd just got the tree out of the loft I had my flashlight handy, so a gentle indirect light was placed on the soldier. Spot exposure on the soldier's face then gave the result you see above.

The bokeh hood is the one supplied by Canon in their Photo5 competition earlier this year. You may recall I had a go with hoods last month? Great fun, and well worth trying especially at this time of year when you may have time to spare and there's lots of lights about!

If you like the image, have any comments or suggestions please let me know.

Bokeh Hoods

Playing with Bokeh Hoods today. I was quite inspired by the simplicity of the hood design provided by Canon in the recent Photo5 competition. Surely it must be easy to make a hood?

I use OmniGraffle on my Mac and set about making up some hood designs. I haven't put any card through the printer yet, just been using coloured paper. The effects are encouraging and I suspect that with card the effect will be fine. Easy to make too! I've saved six different hood designs as a pdf should you wish to try things out yourself.

You'll notice a couple of rings on each hood design. These are 80, 77 and 52 mm in diameter. My lens is 77mm so I cut down to the second ring and then fold over. I then user an elastic band to secure the hood in place. Haver a squiz at the image to the left.

I've been playing with different coloured paper, but think a stiff black paper or thin card would be better. However, for the purpose of showing you how the hood sits on the camera it's probably better than black.

Here's a few images I took using black bokeh hoods. Have a play and let me know how you get on.

Oh, it'd be a good idea to ensure you have a filter on your precious lens prior to playing with the bokeh hoods.