Its been awhile since I blogged about my Visual Toolkit project. I’ve been keeping up (just barely), but haven’t had anything interesting to share. This week’s project was all about bokeh – purposely defocusing your lens to create abstracts. My first go at it was using what I thought should have been an obvious choice, Christmas lights (I should know better than to think a project is a “slam dunk” – the seemingly simple ones are always a lot harder).
After ending up with big white blobs of mess, I decided to forfeit a beautiful sunset over downtown L.A., and try again using city lights with the pink sky above. I tried to create a series, images that had a common theme. In this series there are three lights that typically standout – and then I had to throw in a fourth because it was my favorite.
Here are some tips if you try:
- Start with your aperture setting on the lowest it will go (mine was 4.0) and then defocus.
- Increase your aperture setting if you want the circles to have more defined edges. I personally liked the blurry edges better.
- Look for color and pattern.
After a couple of false starts, I think I am getting hooked. I will continue to try this technique on different subjects and see if I can find a “formula” and series that works for me. I’d be curious to find out what you discovered.
pamphotography 