It’s odd, how sometimes the most off-the-cuff random pictures will come out. I was just pleased that any part of this was in focus, but it turned into a pretty pleasing composition in the end. You can tell I was using the lens last because the focus is on manual (even though from this perspective it looks like it’s set to AF). This was shot with the fading light of afternoon streaming in thought the windows onto the scene, at a very high aperture, low ISO. It was a single hand-held shot in camera raw format, split into two pseudo-HDR images and recomposited in Photoshop for final color and detail balancing. This ended up giving a nice glow to the background and delightfully obscuring the fact that the background is a plastic container, cheap wooden pencil box and glass made from a recycled wine bottle. Low depth of field + gaussian blur FTW!
I am finally starting to understand how gaussian blurs work thanks to my schooling, and they look more natural because gaussian shapes are naturally occurring functions. The image wouldn’t work without the lens blur though, digital manipulation can only get you so good effects.
Tags: art, photography