I am learning to photograph and I want to document everything that i learn in this blog.
I am always mesmerized by the photographs of out of focus lights, after doing some research on Google i learned that it is called Bokeh. Anything that is out of focus not necessarily lights that is aesthetically appealing is called Bokeh (origin Japanese).
This is how I went about achieving that effect.
My Gear: Canon T3i and Canon 55-250 mm lens.
To achieve that blur we need a shallow depth of field meaning the subject should be very near to the lens which will make the background out of focus nearer the subject the more blurred the background ,which is our main objective.
I used colourful christmas lights as the background and used my lens cap as the subject .To get this effect after switching my camera on and making sure that there is a memory card in it I put in on Aperature priority mode Av .
[caption id="attachment_17" align="alignnone" width="474"]
Select Aperature priority(Av) mode[/caption]Then I selected the lowest f value possible for my lens.
Now I placed my lens cap in between the the lights(background) and the lens .Placed the subject(lens cap) as near to the lens as possible .After that I zoomed in and focused on the subject which made the background out of focus. Voila Bokeh!.
Now there are two things you can do :click the picture with the subject as it is or if you want only the blurred background then slowly slide to manual focus and remove the subject .I experimented with both and you can see the results in the gallery below.
Sliding to manual focus after focuing using Auto focus is a trick that worked for me ,you don't have to necessarily do it this way to achieve Bokeh. You can choose Aperature priority ->lowest f stop ->set the camera to manual focus and click away .Here is the gallery of photos I clicked.
[gallery ids="25,26,27,29,30,31,32,33,34,35"]
I shot all the pictures in RAW and I used Canon Digital Photo Professional(DPP) which came with my camera and since I don't have money to invest in Photoshop I used GIMP 2.0 to process the images. I am new to everything and learning every day . GIMP is a free and powerful image manipulation tool and you can go here to download it. I have done very minimal processing the reason being I am learning as I learn i will be posting new stuff.
