Photo2Q2.4: Bokeh Tasks 2-4

Bokeh Daytime

I felt that I was most comfortable doing portrait shots for this bokeh task. It was easier and recognizable to me, as I enjoy shooting candid portraits over simple objects. At the very least, I would want the object to manipulate with a subject somehow, so that's why I asked Reynaldo to balance his shoe on his hand (as shown above). Ensuring bokeh was in the background was quite easy as I was using a f/1.8 50mm lens. I left it wide open (smaller numbers) and adjusted accordingly. I needed the light to pass through some objects to get that circular blur as seen in the trees in the background of both photos, so I attempted various angles to include all of the necessary elements. I enjoy both of these shots for task 2 because of the obvious reason (candid), but also because they best reflect my knowledge on bokeh. Balanced lighting, wide aperture, sufficient lighting, etc.

Bokeh Artificial

I just played around with fairy lights for this concept and observed what kinda shots I could get out of using them when wrapping it around my camera. The challenge was mainly getting the lights to properly "align" and not interfere with the subject, while remaining an important part of the photo. Evening lighting was especially difficult, but a higher ISO adjustment seemed to do the trick, as I am able to remove some of the chromatic noise in post (and reintroduce some artificial noise to prevent the image from appearing unsharpened). 

Bokeh Custom

The primary struggle here was creativity and time constraints. I attempted to use the custom shaped lightning bolt as a metaphor for "flash photography" and stuck my film camera on the table, though I feel that I could've done much better (and actually do two concepts for this and artificial bokeh). I used an overlaying LED desk lamp for some lighting, but I think that some post-production work would've been ideal here (though it wasn't used).

These extra bokeh photos were from a last-minute shoot I did before attending the orchestra concert to kill some time. This shoot was the first in a while of portraits as my photography has indeed grown quite stagnant in interest, and I thought that this was a nice way to practice and to get back into the grind.