Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas to all my readers! I hope you have a wonderful holiday season and thank you for following along on my adventures. More coming in 2019!
Rust and bokeh
“If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” - Wayne Dyer
That statement is so true, and doubly so for photographers, I think. A couple of years ago, I would have walked across this bridge in downtown Austin, paying absolutely no attention to the rusty railing. Now I find myself looking at everything "through the lens", whether I have my camera with me or not. Photography has caused me to slow down, look at everything and see what was never visible to me before. It really has opened up my eyes. Plus it's great fun!
Hop on the bokeh train
Just a little bokeh fun for a Monday morning! I shot this at Union Station in Kansas City. In this case I was just experimenting with bokeh and having fun. Hope your week is off to a great start!
KC bokeh
I almost called this "KC and the bokeh balls" but it sounded way too corny, and brought back distant memories of bad 70's songs and bellbottoms. This is the Kansas City skyline, taken from my hotel room at night. I enjoy these pure bokeh or pure blur shots and really like all the twinkly little bokeh light balls floating all around. Just a fun shot!
A night at the theatre
One evening in Denver I was walking around not too far from my hotel, and discovered their beautiful Performing Arts Complex. I like shooting around theatres and other arts venues, as I always find that they are interesting. I assume since they are dedicated to the arts that they want to look the part! Anyways, I saw this lone empty wine glass sitting there and thought it was fitting for the occasion.
Austin in bokeh
Just playing around with DoF and bokeh, both of which are interesting to me. This is from one of my favorite places to shoot in Austin, looking at the Austin skyline...look familiar to you Austin photogs?
Blue hour bokeh
You know by now that I am a fan of blue hour, and bokeh, so here I combined the two! Why not? Pure blur or complete bokeh is fun to experiment with, and I find that I am always examining a scene through a blurred lens to see if it will work. This was taken on Lake Austin, looking at some boats that were docked and there were some colored lights strung around the area, which I find it a requirement for those beautiful little colored bokeh balls...
Chocolate bokeh
Just a fun pure blur or total bokeh shot from Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco, CA. It was mid-day when I was there, so it was bright, sunny and crowded, therefore it was tough to get the shots I really wanted. I guess I'll have to go back! By the way, the chocolate was good!
Bokeh on the 4th
I usually don't post this many pics in a day, but since these are all related to the 4th of July I wanted to bunch them together and get them all posted pretty close together. This is from the 20th floor of a residential tower in downtown Austin, looking south across the river at the Hyatt Regency (for all you Austin folks). I like bokeh and like to experiment with what I call "pure blur" or a completely unfocused image. It works really well I think at blue hour, and when you can toss in some water and twinkly lights, it comes out pretty sweet. This was just a short bit before the fireworks show began...
Bay Bridge bokeh
Here is another one of my "pure blur" or pure bokeh shots, this one from San Francisco. Though San Fran is obviously a great location for typical photography, I found it to be interesting for these bokeh shots as well since there are so many twinkly lights around. This is the Bay Bridge, and unlike some of my other pure bokeh shots, you can pretty much tell, if you know the bridge. I was on a pier one evening, taking shots of just about everything, and turned and saw this. Of course I got a bunch of "normal" shots of this bridge too, but I just had to spin the dial and blur it up a little!
Bokeh in the streets
As I have written previously, I really enjoy using bokeh in my shots and even the occasional "pure blur" or complete bokeh, such as in this image. I took this while walking the streets of San Francisco, though with the blur I could tell you it was anywhere and you couldn't really tell. But trust me, I am an honest guy. I liked all the colors and the blue sky that I saw, so I set my camera on manual focus, spun the dial a little to get just the right amount of blur, and fired away. That's one of the nice things about shooting this way - no worries if the image isn't perfect because it's blurry to start with! This was taken in the Financial District, sort of near Chinatown. San Fran is a great place and I have plenty more shots to share from there, and most of them are not blurry so that's probably a good thing!
Fairy dust
I have to admit - I am a bokeh guy. I just love it. I am early in my learning but I sure am having fun with it. Something about getting unfocused - isn't that contrary to your typical photographic advice? - is just so cool to me. It's like here's an idea - I know that to be a great photographer you have to focus in on your subject - pun both intended and not - but I am going to completely break all the rules of photography (and logic for that matter) and focus on - get this - nothing. The whole picture will be blurry. It doesn't really make any sense, does it? Nonetheless, I like it. So what the heck. Here's a pure bokeh goodness shot of The Long Center in Austin, with the lights reflected in the lake. See? That's cool, right?
Ghosts in the machine
Here is a new technique that I have been experimenting with lately. Well, it's new to me at least. I call it "bokeh fusion". I always enjoy seeing the wonderful shots that folks take that either incorporate a lot of bokeh, or are pure bokeh. I just think they are cool. So, I recently had the idea to merge some pure bokeh images together, sort of like you do via the HDR process, except that these are not images of the same thing but rather are completely different. Here is what I did: step 1 is to of course take a couple of bokeh images, which I do by setting my lens to Manual Focus, and then purposefully blurring it, then step 2 is to open up Photomatix, but instead of "Generate HDR", you select "Exposure Blending". I have done some exposure blends in Photomatix on my HDR shots before, and generally find that I like the result. There are only a couple of settings that you can experiment with, unlike all the sliders used for tonemapping, but you can create some pretty cool stuff. In this shot, the 1st image is the blue lights in the center, which are from the front of my wireless router. The 2nd image includes both the outer orange ring from a chandelier in a restaurant and the white spot just off-center which was a distant window behind the chandelier. It is fun to experiment - hope you like it!