Picture of the week 12/20/10 Merry Christmas

 

I hope you all had a great day! 

Picture of the week 11/29/10 Christmas Train Redux

I used to have a similar photo that I shot on black and white film a few years ago. I did have a scan of it but it seems to have disappeared. Now that the tree is up I thought I'd recreate it with a twist.

Picture of the week 11/22/10 Lego Man - an exercise in bokeh

The way lights blur in a background when a large aperture is used is called bokeh. If you maximize the effect with a mask on the lens, instead of circles or hexagons you will get the shape of the mask. My kids are really into Legos so I thought I'd give Lego man a shot. It worked fairly well. The plan was to get a portrait of one of the boys with the X-mas bush in the background using the Lego man bokeh mask. Getting him (the boy and the Lego man) to hold still was challenging. I had one cool one but it was out of focus. Even this one is not all that sharp but it was a busy weekend. I would like to try this again with the boys. It's sort of like using a fisheye lens, in that it's not something you'd use every day but it's kind of cool.