September 12, 2012

  • All About Bokeh

    If you are interested in this I have also done posts on Digital Photography & Digital Photography Lighting on my technology blog at

    http://scratbagroberts.com

    Anyway the book I read to research this post was All About Bokeh by David Wayne which is a very good book which I downloaded for free from kindle. This book is around 30 pages so it is a bit short but it covers the basics and there are some nice photographs. Wayne has written a companion book on kindle which I assume you have to pay for called Near to Nature & he also does a magazine called Macro Madness which looks at one technique every month. I will probably get the book and review it at a later stage. Anyway the book is about taking photos with either a macro or zoom lens. Bokeh is a out of focus layer and this can be either the background, midground, foreground or a combination. It is a good idea to have some idea what you are trying to achieve before taking the photo but you can learn a lot from experimenting. On a simple what you might be after is a sharply focused object travelling at speed against a blurred background emphasising that speed. An alternative might be a blurred object travelling at speed against a blurred background again emphasizing that speed and there is often more than one way to get a result. Another alternative might be you copy a photo into a photo editing program and apply a gaussian blur which you can play with just to get it just right. Often when you blur something a little bit it gives it a luminous effect again this takes practice. Finally if you are a serious photographer you need a DSLR camera which lets you view the image through the lens and also has interchangeable lenses. 

oldscratbag

Categories