Bokeh part two.

And it's a bokeh tutorial!

As discussed earlier this year, bokeh is the out-of-focus regions of a photograph. When light is out-of-focus, it can make some pretty cool effects. But what if you don't want to wait around to stumble upon it? Here's the easy way to bokeh.

Start with a subject.



Then, hold your hand in front of the camera and press the shutter halfway to focus. Keeping the button pressed, remove your hand and take the picture. BAM.



This was done with my hand held pretty far away from the camera. Bringing it in about halfway achieved this size of bokeh:



And bringing my hand as close as I could to the lens without making it impossible to focus:



It's a simple but pretty awesome technique. I think if the lights had been on, the bokeh would have been more translucent, but that's an experiment for another day.

Have fun!

O Christmas Tree.

Ponderances in duochrome.

(Actual ponderances after the pictures. Promise.)













There is so, so much to be said for how the world and life are viewed through black-and-white or sepia. Sadly, this is not that kind of blog post.

I wanted to mention briefly how relatively easy it is to make a "just okay" picture more interesting by converting it to a form of black-and-white. The first photo, for example, is just okay in color. I really only took it as a reminder later of where the batch of photos was taken along the Parkway.

By de-saturing it and then upping the contrast (a lot), however, to me it now has a certain gravity, even in its bleakness.

The Brinegar cabin, the cemetery, and the tree were taken in sepia mode in the camera, so here I just upped the contrast (to a lesser extent with the tree). The pipe and butterfly pictures were originally in color.

What's neat about the butterfly picture is that he was so bright, even with the photo almost completely de-saturated, his color survives somewhat. I didn't do much with the contrast in order to maintain this effect.

Most professional photographers agree, it seems, that the best way to create black-and-white photography is to take your photos in color, and then manipulate them in post-processing. Photo editors now give you tons of options and flexibility when converting to B&W, and there are of course many different shades and tones and presets to choose from. The argument is, if you start out with a B&W picture, there's really no place left to go - you're stuck with what the camera gave you, and there isn't much on-board choice.

I only used the rinky-dink Windows photo editor, because I haven't had the time to fully devote to learning how to use the B&W options in Adobe or GIMP. I still like the results, and God-willing, there'll be plenty of time in the future to devote to learning. =)

Born is the King.

Baby, it's cold outside.

So I'm thinking warm thoughts. :)

(It's supposed to snow this weekend. You know what that means...)

It's the holiday season.

It snowed just a bit on Thanksgiving day. What a nice, holiday-cheer sight to see. :)



We congregated at my aunt's house. Remember the angel?



We ate. A lot. And I (mostly) made the dressing. :)

Happy holidays.