Bokeh is originally a Japanese word meaning ‘blur’ or ‘haze’ (Wikipedia). So, in photography, bokeh is used when you take a photo with a very shallow focus (big aperture), the area that are out of focus will be blurry. Bokeh is mostly used for night photography where the light is out of focus and blurry and give it a bit of artistic feeling on it. Recently, I made an experiment with custom bokeh shapes with Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens.
How?
Basically, all we need to do is just covering the lens with shaped filter in black. I use lens cup with whole on it and put my custom shaped filter behind it: simple and save place in your camera bag. Another way is you could make a filter that you can put on top of your lens like most tutorial on youtube do. Or you can buy factory made custom bokeh filters, neatness guarantee but at the moment, I’m showing you my DIY filters.
Here are what I did, would be more shopisticated when the lights are more colorful and make it in video with movements. Will wait til the wet season gone and can not wait for Mindil Beach opening or Territory Day with lots of fireworks:) :
Here are the results:
Bokeh No filterBokeh with broken heart shaped filterBokeh with question mark shaped filterBokeh with positive shaped filterBokeh with star shaped filter
Have you ever been disappointed by your camera, or more to yourself for taking a rare opportunity photo but out of focus? I have :D. No software can fix that problem at the moment until recently new invention came up with LYTRO.
Meant to shot me,not the bridge :D. It will be different story if it was shot with Lytro.
Its a light field camera that can be used by anyone and no need to worry about the focus. Simple words, shoot now focus later. They just started shipping the new product to their first buyers on 29 February 2012. This brilliant invention captures a photo with a large depth of focus so with only using their software, we can choose or change the focus as we please. By uploading to their gallery, we can even play around with the focus by clicking the point where you want it to be focused. I can imagine now the problem like my picture above will be gone soon with DSLRs applying this technology.
Lytro Light Field Camera
Here are some photos that you can play around with the focus. The picture is not live in this blog because wordpress.com doesn’t allow iframeembedding, but if you click below images and go to the link, you can play around with it and see what I mean.
Click image to see live photoClick image to see and play around with focus. Wait until its fully loadedClick to see and play around with focus.Click images to see Lytro camera result.
As I’m now starting to get into videography, and I myself enjoy traveling (who wouldn’t?), here are some amazing and inspiring travel video. I kinda like to go to vimeo.com than youtube because you find lots of craps in youtube and Vimeo are more selected and arty video. Very easy to find a quality video for reference and the forum makes it good place to learn. Anyway, this shouldn’t be a comparison between two but about travel photography.
I guess to have a good travel video most of the one I like to use tripod and wide-angle lenses with a big aperture. Timelapse is popular for travel videography and the result could be amazing, taken from different angles and with a bit of panning too. Thing is when you travel, are you going to take all of your photography gear or just basic stuff? Well, if you call yourself enthusiast you should. GoPro camera would put your travel video more lively and increasingly very popular.
Here are some videos that I like:
1. The Longest Way 1.0 | One-year walk/beard grow time lapse (Featured Above)
This guy is pretty inspiring, he did a walking trip and went for 4500km through China and Gobi Desert and even tough he never finished his goal to Germany, still pretty awesome. He took photos his face every day and see how he doesn’t look like he did. Not surprised if this video won so many short film festivals.
2. Eat, Move and Learn
Thats what we do on our travel. Rick Mereki did an awesome job on doing the video:
He decided to quit his job to travel and took timelapse videos around the world and this is what he achieved 17 countries later. This video has been featured in mainstream medias. Wish I could take that decision….
6. Many Steps (Takayuki Akachi)
This is another unique idea that he traveled the world and filmed some daily life and corners of places he visited. Awesome!
Beautifully done this video is. With Canon EOS 5D Mark II and shallow depth of focus with 50mm f1.4 made this video so elegant and gave it a warm feeling to watch.
2011 had been an interesting year for my photo journey. We went to the Philippines for the first time, that was exciting and beautiful, went back to Indonesia to visit families and had a chance to go to Sulawesi and dive in Bunaken, something that I’ve always wanted as it was apparently one of the best diving spots in Indonesia.
The highlight was when we were about to go home to Darwin and visited my aunt in Denpasar and was looking for a taxi and then someone with his motorbike grabbed my EOS camera and ran away, but then the insurance was easy enough to cover the lost and with the same price as the lost camera I bought, I could upgrade to a better one. Although, I still can’t forgive myself for not backing up the photos from that holiday.
And the other highlight is I made some of my shots into the local newspapers, and one of them, which was the Cyclone Carlos, was on the front page.
Anyway, 😊 here are some photos from 2011 that I like, should’ve been more with the lost one:
Cyclone Carlos
Cyclone Carlos, Darwin | February 2011Cyclone Carlos, The Headline | February 2011(more…)
