So the other day, due to a set of not-so-complicated and thoroughly un-mysterious reasons that I won’t bother mentioning here, I found myself outside of my usual North Vancouver photographic playground and needing to kill an hour in the area of downtown Vancouver inhabited by the University of British Columbia. I had come prepared to spend the hour walking along the sea wall trying to seek out some shots of the Bay and it’s bridges. However I am quite prone to becoming distracted by things that capture my imagination and never completing my original goals. Good thing I’m not a certain 18th century British explorer as I’d probably have gotten as far as Cape Horn before being distracted by a brightly coloured bird, driving my flag into the nearest patch of dirt in the name of Her Majesty and then calling it a day. Lucky, as otherwise now I’d have nowhere to call home… and I’d also be dead.
The object of my distraction in this instance was a small sign directing me to the UBC’s Botanical Gardens. I thought it might offer an opportunity to get some unique flower and fauna shots, something I don’t have a chance to shoot all that often. The gardens also turned out to hold a spectacular plethora of brightly coloured species with which to try a few macro style experiments with.
Apart from trying to do the wonderful, naturally occurring colours justice I was also experimenting with a photographic technique known as Bokeh.
Bokeh is a Japanese term that refers to the softening or blurring of various areas in a shot as a result of using a shallow depth of field. Bokeh occurs in almost all photographs to some degree but quite often it will be exploited in order to move the emphasis of shot to highlight particular elements, usually a subject in the foreground.
I’ve found it to be an incredibly easy technique to use, only requiring the most basic camera operations to achieve. The amount and style of Bokeh achieved is highly dependant on both your camera and lens setup and also on how you form the shot but instead of pretending like I’m an expert on a technique that I’m only just starting to understand myself I will instead refer you to Robert Donovan’s blog and his excellent introduction to Bokeh for an explanation on it’s finer points.
Editing these photos also gave me a great opportunity to play around with shot composition. As a sort of personal learning experiment I decided to crop all the shots according to a particular aspect ratio, which is why they all appear as unusually wide. It turned out to be a fantastic way to learn how the inclusion of certain foreground and background elements effects the overall composition of a shot. I tend not to edit my photos as much as some others do, preferring instead to try and make the changes at the camera level before hitting the button but it also reminded me that the crop tool has it’s place in my toolbox.
That’s it for now. Feel free to explore around the site as much as you like or leave some feedback on your own experiments with Bokeh. You’ll have to excuse me though, as I’m off to buy the very cheapest bottle of red I can find to celebrate finishing the site and writing my first post.
