Background Bokeh

[MarkyLandon]

With Spring rapidly springing all around there are a wealth of Photographic Opportunities. This little flower is a Grape Hyacinth from my garden, they're really cheery little flowers. I picked it, put it in a small glass, repositioned it to a shady spot out of the direct sun and made sure I had a nice uniform background. The background was a holly bush in the direct sun and the light glinting off the leaves has given the circular "bokeh" effect. To acheive a similar effect use a lens with a "long" focal length (say>50mm). Shoot in aperture priority mode with a wide aperture f/5.6 - f/2.8 or even f/1.8 if you have a lens that'll open that wide. Finally ensure that the camera - subject distance is << than subject to background distance. Having a background that has very bright specular highlights will give the best bokeh. The light in the shaded area was still sufficient to hand hold the shot without resorting to a tripod but if your shutter speed starts to drop below 1/focal lenth then think about using a tripod or resting your camera on a solid surface to avoid shake.



In terms of post processing. This was done entirely in Lightroom 2 as part of the raw conversion. I boosted the colours slightly with Vibrance and an increase in the blacks. Clarity was increased and then some further sharpening. I played with the tone curve to increase the highlights and lights and decrease the shadows and darks to give a further contrast boost. Exported to my flickr stream using Jeffry Friedl's excellent lightroom plug in (Jeffrey Friedl's Blog » Jeffrey’s Lightroom Goodies (Plugins and Tools)) and also using the LR2 Mogrify plug in from Timothy Armes to provide the borders and signature direct from ligthroom on export. Photographer's toolbox - Best Plugins and Web Engines for Adobe Lightroom

[zona5101]

Beautiful image! Nice write up as well. Thanks for including those links too!

[Just Cute]

I'm impressed your work is perfect
thanks for the details

[Aleix]

Nice photo and thanks for sharing the tips

Greetings

[SusanH1970]

Stunning image...beautiful colors and bokehlicious!

[slewi]

Yeah. This photo pretty much rocks!

[pjnr56]

Nice shot, nice work behind the scenes with LR and thanks for the useful info and links.

[tasmo2]

Very cool! I have never seen this before (of course im very new so that may be why!) But I gave it a go today and am fairly pleased! I will try this more soon!!



So the reason for the background size difference, is it because I had small leaves?

[MarkyLandon]

Tasmo, Well done, it looks great.

I think there are several reasons for the difference in size of Bokeh but it's to do with the ratio of camera to subject and subject to background. Your flower is much bigger than mine (I think). Mine was only about 1" or 25mm tall so I was pretty close to it for the shot... less than 3 feet (1M) with a 100mm lens. My background was then a further 20plus feet away giving a very out of focus background = large bokeh. I would imagine that you were further away from the subject and the background was coser. But do't worry about it you've still acheived a really nice effect..

[tasmo2]

oh okay! So probably also a lens thing. LOL I just started in photography a few months ago so all I have is the lens that came with my camera. ha! I have lens envy from everyone on here! I was only a few inches from the flower and only a foot from the bush. That's probably the difference! Thanks for the info!