Out of focus highlights

click photo to enlarge
One of the things I like about photography is the "accidental" effects that lenses and sensors produce. Of course they are not really accidental - all can be explained scientifically - so perhaps unforeseen is a better way to describe them. What am I referring to? Well, it can be the way that shooting contre jour sometimes produces a sepia effect. Or it can be the flare that the sun introduces as it bounces around inside the lens elements. But for me the best unforeseen effects are present in out of focus highlights.

In 2011 I was using a macro lens to photograph some glass marbles; shiny, spherical glass balls with colours inside them. I was captivated by the beautiful out of focus highlight effects that I saw before I brought the lens into focus. At the end of the session I decided that these out of focus shots were far superior to the sharp photographs of the subject that I had originally intended to take. The other day, as I was photographing some sunlit steel mesh that filled in the rails at the side of a footbridge, I noticed some unusual out of focus highlights, examples that looked positively three dimensional. The small photograph above shows the mesh as I initially photographed it, with it gradually appearing and intensifying as sharpness decreases. The main image is a crop of a shot I took solely of the effect. Not great photography I think, but noteworthy and an addition to my collection of such phenomena.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Photo 2
Camera: Nikon D5300
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 140mm (210mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f8
Shutter Speed: 1/500 sec
ISO:100
Exposure Compensation: -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Weeds and razor wire

click photo to enlarge
It's odd, the things that attract our eye as photographers. It may be something conventionally beautiful such as a landscape, a sunset or a ship on the wave-tossed ocean. On the other hand, it could be a subject that is generally regarded as ugly, unworthy of consideration or just plain ordinary - such as weed or razor wire. On an early blog post I chose razor wire as a subject and discussed its place in the modern world. And, at various times, I've photographed weeds a.k.a. wild flowers for their unique qualities.

Consequently, when I saw spirals of razor wire on top of an old brick wall that was growing a luxuriant crop of weeds I had to point my camera in their direction. I consciously chose a long focal length to throw a good deal of the subject out of focus, and was pleased with the way the wire, in places, lost some of its hard sharpness - photographically speaking that is!

© Tony Boughen

Camera: Nikon D5300
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 140mm (210mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f8
Shutter Speed: 1/250 sec
ISO:220
Exposure Compensation: -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

D.O.F. and O.O.F.

click photo to enlarge

There seems to be some confusion surrounding the word "acronym". It is widely believed to be the use of consecutive initials. I've seen BBC and RSA so described. However, these are initialisms, "a group of initial letters used as an abbreviation for a name or expression, each letter or part being pronounced separately" (OED). An acronym is, "a word formed from the initial letters of other words" (OED). So, CIA isn't one because those three letters don't make a proper and pronounceable word, but AIDS certainly is (acquired immune deficiency syndrome). Confusion arises when we come to words such as radar (radio detection and ranging).  Isn't "radar", we might legitimately ask, almost but not quite an acronym, because it's an instance where the OED rule doesn't fully work? The fact is, that in the attempt to clearly define categories of words we've gone part way down the road to complete clarity by introducing ever more esoteric groupings, but have lost the value of a basic rule, not quite covered every eventuality, and sown more than a small degree of confusion. As this article shows.

Photography, like many other areas of special interest, is plagued by initialisms, acronyms and other kinds of abbreviations, to the extent that when I'm reading an article I sometimes feel the need for a glossary alongside me. It gets worse if you frequent photography forums because there you come up against all of this, but overlaid with examples of text-speak. One that has arisen in recent years is dof, DOF or D.O.F., meaning depth of field. (Whether we should continue to use full stops to indicate abbreviations or dispense with them, in the modern manner, is another subject for another day!) I think this has come about as people who have known only digital photography have moved from the once ubiquitous small sensor digicams to cameras with Four Thirds, APS-C and 35mm sensors. The depth of field of a small sensor is very big so oof (or OOF or O.O.F.), that is to say out of focus areas (also now called bokeh), are more difficult to achieve. With such cameras, if you want lens blur, you tend to have to either get very close to the subject or use a long telephoto. Larger sensors can achieve it in these ways too, but also by increasing the aperture. A consequence of all this is that shallow DOF shots have become very popular, so have large aperture lenses, and the value of a deep DOF - one of the challenges we sometimes struggled to achieve in the days of 35mm and larger film cameras - is currently less valued.

I was reflecting on this as I used my macro lens to take this very shallow depth of field shot of our oriental lilies. I photographed our white ones last year. This year we have red/brown and pink blooms as well as white. Out of the few shots I took this one intrigued me because the OOF areas resemble a liquid - perhaps pea soup - out of which the stigma and anthers are barely projecting.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 100mm macro
F No: f2.8
Shutter Speed: 1/80 sec
ISO: 125
Exposure Compensation:  +0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On