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

Seed pods!

Liquid Amber Seed Heads

I don't know what it is, but there's definitely something about these seed pods that intrigue me.  Perhaps it's their shape or the way they roll down the driveway scattering seeds?

Looking at the seed pods I wanted to make them as sharp as I could and blur the background.  I used a 200mm focal length and an aperture of f4.  I kept using the depth of field preview to make sure I had as much of the seed pods in focus as possible without bringing in too much of the background.

On my computer I used Silver Efex and added a bit of a lighter coloured vignette to guide your eye to the interesting things.  As before there's a bit of interest along a diagonal, and the seed pods are  reasonably sharp.  Perhaps let me know what you think?

Those seed heads again!