It's got great texture, Flyingman. And I dig the limited color palette, too.
I never use "save for web" anymore. It strips the exif-data and it alters the colors sometimes (even if I am editing in sRGB). I find my colors are preserved more accurately if I just use "save as."
I am spending a lot of time trying to research bokeh - I understand how lenses render it, the difference between "good" and "bad" bokeh from the perspective of the shapes that a point of light take on when out-of-focus, but find very little discussion anywhere on composing the out-of-focus parts of a picture for artistic reasons. Most people who write about photography that I can find tend to only speak about the mechanical functions of the camera and/or the general formulaic aspects of light and composition. I suspect this is because the people writing are professional photographers (weddings, portraits, or products) and not necessarily choosing "art" as their aim. For professional purposes, formulaic shooting makes some sense. But I know there are people somewhere in the world who consider the aesthetics of foreground/background, the decision of how much to blur, etc when composing. I just can't find much in the way of discussion of this.
So, to satisfy my curiosity I am left with experimentation. In that vein, here are the pleasing (to me) results of my first foray into composing bokeh instead of merely composing the in-focus subject and letting the background just 'happen'.
but find very little discussion anywhere on composing the out-of-focus parts of a picture for
Why not compose those parts with the same rules for the in-focus parts of the picture? In or out of focus is just one characteristic in how an object is rendered in the frame. Very crisp focus is normally ideal because it represents desired objects in the frame with little/ no perceived distortion created by the process of capturing the image. However, this distortion is only a problem when it is not desired by the photographer and it is interfering with the photographer's vision of how the image should look. If you want to compose with out-of-focus elements then I think you need to understand what those elements mean to your vision and not what any rules say about them. Regardless of its aesthetic appeal, a picture is only good if it communicates what you intended for it to communicate.
but find very little discussion anywhere on composing the out-of-focus parts of a picture for
Why not compose those parts with the same rules for the in-focus parts of the picture? In or out of focus is just one characteristic in how an object is rendered in the frame. Very crisp focus is normally ideal because it represents desired objects in the frame with little/ no perceived distortion created by the process of capturing the image. However, this distortion is only a problem when it is not desired by the photographer and it is interfering with the photographer's vision of how the image should look. If you want to compose with out-of-focus elements then I think you need to understand what those elements mean to your vision and not what any rules say about them. Regardless of its aesthetic appeal, a picture is only good if it communicates what you intended for it to communicate.
While I agree with you, I think there is a more abstract layer to visual communication that can be achieved with the out-of-focus area of a picture. Unlike painting and unlike drawing and unlike 'real life' photography renders the non-subject matter in a controllable amount of blur. Painters tend to paint foreground and background in focus and use intensity of color and lightness/darkness (as well as perspective) to demonstrate what is subject and what is background. The other visual arts are the same except photography. Well, that's true for most photography, most landscape photos tend to use narrow apertures for maximum DOF to keep all elements in simliar focus, so I am excluding this branch of photography from my thoughts.
So when I take a street portrait (as opposed to studio) so I blur the background barely? Do I blur it to an extreme? Do I step back and use a much longer lens so as to blur it into a color-gradient with no texture (many wildlife shots are like this, especially birds). If I choose to keep some nominal amount of focus so as to suggest recognizable background objects (look at most Leica rangefinder pics, those tend to have slight blur but not extreme blur) how much time do I spend trying different viewpoints to place the background objects into locations that now have some level of meaning when related back to the subject? Do I seek a high-contrast scene with lots of light and dark points so the blurred background becomes very fractured?
I realize this is a conversation about aesthetics and there are no rules. There are some concepts that seem to apply fairly consistently (see the general photography composition concepts: s-curve, diagonals, rule-of-thirds, etc) but I am curious what general concepts people use for composing the out-of-focus areas other than "I didn't think about it except to check the final product and make sure it wasn't distracting," (a mentality I attribute to portraitists and wedding photogs in general).
That middle one is really awesome pope, really awesome.
Thanks! That one consistently gets the most response from my friends. I like it a lot, too. I guess for me the darkness of the colors somehow feel brooding which fits the fragmented shapes of the leaves. I am trying to understand how to consciously plan to implement ideas and feelings. At the moment it's hard to predict if something will 'work.' Hence my interest in reading what others have thought before me as well as my experimenting.
It's funny, I played with this a while back without consciously setting out to use 'bokeh.' Here are a few pics I've posted previously (hence the spoiler) where I was fiddling with repeating foregound shapes in the background albeit blurred:
I see now that all of these were attempt to use bokeh to compliment the subject, to take a photograph where the in-focus and the out-of-focus parts interact.
but find very little discussion anywhere on composing the out-of-focus parts of a picture for
Why not compose those parts with the same rules for the in-focus parts of the picture? In or out of focus is just one characteristic in how an object is rendered in the frame. Very crisp focus is normally ideal because it represents desired objects in the frame with little/ no perceived distortion created by the process of capturing the image. However, this distortion is only a problem when it is not desired by the photographer and it is interfering with the photographer's vision of how the image should look. If you want to compose with out-of-focus elements then I think you need to understand what those elements mean to your vision and not what any rules say about them. Regardless of its aesthetic appeal, a picture is only good if it communicates what you intended for it to communicate.
While I agree with you, I think there is a more abstract layer to visual communication that can be achieved with the out-of-focus area of a picture. Unlike painting and unlike drawing and unlike 'real life' photography renders the non-subject matter in a controllable amount of blur. Painters tend to paint foreground and background in focus and use intensity of color and lightness/darkness (as well as perspective) to demonstrate what is subject and what is background. The other visual arts are the same except photography. Well, that's true for most photography, most landscape photos tend to use narrow apertures for maximum DOF to keep all elements in simliar focus, so I am excluding this branch of photography from my thoughts.
So when I take a street portrait (as opposed to studio) so I blur the background barely? Do I blur it to an extreme? Do I step back and use a much longer lens so as to blur it into a color-gradient with no texture (many wildlife shots are like this, especially birds). If I choose to keep some nominal amount of focus so as to suggest recognizable background objects (look at most Leica rangefinder pics, those tend to have slight blur but not extreme blur) how much time do I spend trying different viewpoints to place the background objects into locations that now have some level of meaning when related back to the subject? Do I seek a high-contrast scene with lots of light and dark points so the blurred background becomes very fractured?
I realize this is a conversation about aesthetics and there are no rules. There are some concepts that seem to apply fairly consistently (see the general photography composition concepts: s-curve, diagonals, rule-of-thirds, etc) but I am curious what general concepts people use for composing the out-of-focus areas other than "I didn't think about it except to check the final product and make sure it wasn't distracting," (a mentality I attribute to portraitists and wedding photogs in general).
This is a very interesting conversation. You mention a lot of things you can do with the out of focus areas in a photo; all of which sound compelling. You're right in that most thought about blur in photos is that it is used to draw attention to what is not blurred, and there really isn't much thought into the aesthetic principals of the out-of-focus areas, then its kinda wide open for you to experiment and decide what you like, or perhaps you can look to other forms of art for those principals. I'm sure there are parallels to this out-of-focus aesthetic in expressionist, abstract expressionist, or post-modern painting.
Anable, I really love your animal shots, is there a trick to deciding whether you go with color or black and white? I don't really have an eye for thinking something will look good in b/w until I load it into Lightroom and try it out.
Honestly, there's very few shots that I take while thinking "this would look good in black and white." Normally I don't decide on that until I get the image into Lightroom. At that point, I base it on a few different things. In these latest shots, I went with grayscale because the sun was creating deep shadows and blown out highlights. On other occasions I do it because I either don't like the colors but love the subject or because the black and white adds and intensity that I think works with the picture. Mostly, it's just me experimenting.
For your specific shots, I think they all suffer from sun bleaching like Mustang mentioned. Still, I think they would be recoverable with some tweaking. If you don't mind, I'd like to take a shot at it once I get home and access to Lightroom.
That middle one is really awesome pope, really awesome.
It's funny, I played with this a while back without consciously setting out to use 'bokeh.' Here are a few pics I've posted previously (hence the spoiler) where I was fiddling with repeating foregound shapes in the background albeit blurred:
Pope - from your first post, I like that middle shot the best. I think it's the colors as you mentioned. I really like this other shot that I've taken the liberty of unspoilering because I think it's great. I get a spring breeze feeling from the colors and the bokeh. It's just really warm and likable.
This is my first post in this thread and one of the first photos taken with my new Canon Rebel XT (I think it's the EOS 350D is other parts of the world).
I'm new to the DSLR world. This was just taken with the close-up setting and the lens that comes with the kit.
All good stuff Gravity. The black and white in the first one works really well and I love the swirling leaves. The colors in the second one are good, but I feel like the street line should be either center or more off to the side. Right now it hangs in between and seems a little off. I think the processing in the third one works well too. Nice lines, etc. I like the color in the fourth, but unfortunately not much else. Seems a bit bland. Also, the last reposted image is fantastic. I don't think I mentioned it the first time around.
Wow. I really love pope's bokeh experiments! And the above, by Gravity, are also wonderful. I hope my post starts a new page, because my stuff has no place amongst them. :P
I tried my hand at night photography for the first time, tonight. I am using a P&S (PowerShot SD850), so that's a bit of a challenge, and the quality is never going to be great. I used a little, tabletop tripod to at least keep the ISO down to about 200, which is still pushing it on this camera. The below is the only shot of the night that seems half-decent.
Gilrain: I like the bike and the overall lighting of the photo: the mangled body of the bike and the heavy shadows give it a nice abstract feel, though I must admit that the T-bar in the center leads me away from the bike to the upper corners, which is kinda distracting. Did you add the sepia tone at all, or did it come out just from shooting at night?
Keep shooting!
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"I assure you, your distaste only reveals your ignorance."
The sepia tone is natural. The only lighting was an orangish sidewalk lamp, and I purposefully didn't set my whitepoint as it wouldn't've been representative of the colors actually present. And, noted on the distracting T-bar.
I'm considering upgrading my 430ex flash unit (or buying a second flash to supplement it). Should I get a Nikon SB-800 or Canon 580ex? I have a Canon camera, but the Nikon SB-800 is cheaper for the same features, and is higher reviews on FredMiranda.com. If I were to get the Nikon flash, would it work, both on-camera and off, with my Canon 40D? I don't need any automatic features, just full-manual.
If I kept my 430ex, would the SB-800 work with the 430ex?
Earl, I got bored and fiddled with your pictures. All of this was done in Lightroom using just the "Basic" and "Tone" headings. Just wanted to show you that even with uncooperative light you can still keep colors and detail.
Wider DoF would throw the bridge even more out of focus, and I think seeing as it's a somewhat important element in the picture that it's fine how it is. Agreed about the lighting though. Also your lens or sensor is majorly dusty.
Wider DoF would throw the bridge even more out of focus, and I think seeing as it's a somewhat important element in the picture that it's fine how it is. Agreed about the lighting though. Also your lens or sensor is majorly dusty.
I think Long meant a higher fstop (hence the wider DoF), that way the subject's full body is in focus. With a wider DoF, the bridge might be a little more in focus, or there might be no change.
I think I agree with Long--the framing is nice, but the unfocused parts of the girl are distracting.
Is it really an issue that the soft parts of her clothing, that are not intended to be any focus of the picture at all, are a little more in focus? Her face is already less-than-profile, there's no need to detract from the focus on that.
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I never use "save for web" anymore. It strips the exif-data and it alters the colors sometimes (even if I am editing in sRGB). I find my colors are preserved more accurately if I just use "save as."
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EDIT:
I am spending a lot of time trying to research bokeh - I understand how lenses render it, the difference between "good" and "bad" bokeh from the perspective of the shapes that a point of light take on when out-of-focus, but find very little discussion anywhere on composing the out-of-focus parts of a picture for artistic reasons. Most people who write about photography that I can find tend to only speak about the mechanical functions of the camera and/or the general formulaic aspects of light and composition. I suspect this is because the people writing are professional photographers (weddings, portraits, or products) and not necessarily choosing "art" as their aim. For professional purposes, formulaic shooting makes some sense. But I know there are people somewhere in the world who consider the aesthetics of foreground/background, the decision of how much to blur, etc when composing. I just can't find much in the way of discussion of this.
So, to satisfy my curiosity I am left with experimentation. In that vein, here are the pleasing (to me) results of my first foray into composing bokeh instead of merely composing the in-focus subject and letting the background just 'happen'.
My Website | My "photo-a-day" 2010
My Portfolio Site
Why not compose those parts with the same rules for the in-focus parts of the picture? In or out of focus is just one characteristic in how an object is rendered in the frame. Very crisp focus is normally ideal because it represents desired objects in the frame with little/ no perceived distortion created by the process of capturing the image. However, this distortion is only a problem when it is not desired by the photographer and it is interfering with the photographer's vision of how the image should look. If you want to compose with out-of-focus elements then I think you need to understand what those elements mean to your vision and not what any rules say about them. Regardless of its aesthetic appeal, a picture is only good if it communicates what you intended for it to communicate.
Your Current Signature Picture[/SIGPIC]
While I agree with you, I think there is a more abstract layer to visual communication that can be achieved with the out-of-focus area of a picture. Unlike painting and unlike drawing and unlike 'real life' photography renders the non-subject matter in a controllable amount of blur. Painters tend to paint foreground and background in focus and use intensity of color and lightness/darkness (as well as perspective) to demonstrate what is subject and what is background. The other visual arts are the same except photography. Well, that's true for most photography, most landscape photos tend to use narrow apertures for maximum DOF to keep all elements in simliar focus, so I am excluding this branch of photography from my thoughts.
So when I take a street portrait (as opposed to studio) so I blur the background barely? Do I blur it to an extreme? Do I step back and use a much longer lens so as to blur it into a color-gradient with no texture (many wildlife shots are like this, especially birds). If I choose to keep some nominal amount of focus so as to suggest recognizable background objects (look at most Leica rangefinder pics, those tend to have slight blur but not extreme blur) how much time do I spend trying different viewpoints to place the background objects into locations that now have some level of meaning when related back to the subject? Do I seek a high-contrast scene with lots of light and dark points so the blurred background becomes very fractured?
I realize this is a conversation about aesthetics and there are no rules. There are some concepts that seem to apply fairly consistently (see the general photography composition concepts: s-curve, diagonals, rule-of-thirds, etc) but I am curious what general concepts people use for composing the out-of-focus areas other than "I didn't think about it except to check the final product and make sure it wasn't distracting," (a mentality I attribute to portraitists and wedding photogs in general).
My Website | My "photo-a-day" 2010
Thanks! That one consistently gets the most response from my friends. I like it a lot, too. I guess for me the darkness of the colors somehow feel brooding which fits the fragmented shapes of the leaves. I am trying to understand how to consciously plan to implement ideas and feelings. At the moment it's hard to predict if something will 'work.' Hence my interest in reading what others have thought before me as well as my experimenting.
It's funny, I played with this a while back without consciously setting out to use 'bokeh.' Here are a few pics I've posted previously (hence the spoiler) where I was fiddling with repeating foregound shapes in the background albeit blurred:
I see now that all of these were attempt to use bokeh to compliment the subject, to take a photograph where the in-focus and the out-of-focus parts interact.
My Website | My "photo-a-day" 2010
This is a very interesting conversation. You mention a lot of things you can do with the out of focus areas in a photo; all of which sound compelling. You're right in that most thought about blur in photos is that it is used to draw attention to what is not blurred, and there really isn't much thought into the aesthetic principals of the out-of-focus areas, then its kinda wide open for you to experiment and decide what you like, or perhaps you can look to other forms of art for those principals. I'm sure there are parallels to this out-of-focus aesthetic in expressionist, abstract expressionist, or post-modern painting.
Your Current Signature Picture[/SIGPIC]
Honestly, there's very few shots that I take while thinking "this would look good in black and white." Normally I don't decide on that until I get the image into Lightroom. At that point, I base it on a few different things. In these latest shots, I went with grayscale because the sun was creating deep shadows and blown out highlights. On other occasions I do it because I either don't like the colors but love the subject or because the black and white adds and intensity that I think works with the picture. Mostly, it's just me experimenting.
For your specific shots, I think they all suffer from sun bleaching like Mustang mentioned. Still, I think they would be recoverable with some tweaking. If you don't mind, I'd like to take a shot at it once I get home and access to Lightroom.
Pope - from your first post, I like that middle shot the best. I think it's the colors as you mentioned. I really like this other shot that I've taken the liberty of unspoilering because I think it's great. I get a spring breeze feeling from the colors and the bokeh. It's just really warm and likable.
This is my first post in this thread and one of the first photos taken with my new Canon Rebel XT (I think it's the EOS 350D is other parts of the world).
I'm new to the DSLR world. This was just taken with the close-up setting and the lens that comes with the kit.
I also slightly increased the color saturation.
Reposting this one after a compression mishap:
I also like the B&W a lot, Gravity. The birds add a great mood. Also #3 has great lines!
My Website | My "photo-a-day" 2010
Damn, you're right. I thought they were birds at first and then thought leaves, and now I'm back to birds again.
I tried my hand at night photography for the first time, tonight. I am using a P&S (PowerShot SD850), so that's a bit of a challenge, and the quality is never going to be great. I used a little, tabletop tripod to at least keep the ISO down to about 200, which is still pushing it on this camera. The below is the only shot of the night that seems half-decent.
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Gilrain: I like the bike and the overall lighting of the photo: the mangled body of the bike and the heavy shadows give it a nice abstract feel, though I must admit that the T-bar in the center leads me away from the bike to the upper corners, which is kinda distracting. Did you add the sepia tone at all, or did it come out just from shooting at night?
Keep shooting!
Thanks!
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(These are old and examples of the Sigma 10-20mm lens)
Loves it.
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Sweet, I had pretty much decided that's what I was going to try for. This just confirms it, thanks Sheri!
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If I kept my 430ex, would the SB-800 work with the 430ex?
Earl, I got bored and fiddled with your pictures. All of this was done in Lightroom using just the "Basic" and "Tone" headings. Just wanted to show you that even with uncooperative light you can still keep colors and detail.
Love the capture. The lighting is a bit harsh and I'd have liked a wider DOF. What was your f/x.x on that?
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I think I agree with Long--the framing is nice, but the unfocused parts of the girl are distracting.