Sasha wide open

My friends and I often debate which lenses have the best "Bokeh", or out of focus pleasing characteristics. I like the lens I used here, the 50 mm Leica Summicron, shooting it wide open. Leica lenses are designed to be shot wide open, and most street shooters will shoot with the aperture wide open, or with the widest f-stop setting. This gives pleasing out of focus areas in front or behind the subject in focus. Some lenses give more pleasing Bokeh than others. Its just a characteristic of the design and the glass in the lens. Here you can see that the foreground and background are out of focus. The area in focus is a very narrow region, and depending on the f-stop, can be very narrow, such that only the eyes, for instance, may be in focus, while the tip of the nose and the back of the ears may be out of focus. In this image, the region in focus is not quite this narrow.

Montana Stream and Forest

One of my favorite images taken on a trip through Glacier National Park. I had recently purchased my Nikon D700, and this trip was the first opportunity to use it. I was amazed at the painterly effect that the D700 can impart to a photograph, with very little Photoshop adjustment, other than the standard black and white point, etc. Many photographs taken with a DSLR can be too dark right out of the camera, unless exposed properly, utilizing the ETTR principle. In other words, DSLR cameras have a default exposure where the exposure is too far to the left on the histogram. I learned about this principle on the Luminous Landscape website. ETTR means to expose to the right, utilizing the histogram to monitor this. Doing so can eliminate a lot of camera noise, which is more prevalent in the shadows. Exposing to the right maximizes exposure so that noise is drastically reduced. There is much less noise at the highlight side of the histogram. Still, you need to be careful not to clip at the high end. The best way to achieve a proper exposure is to set the compensation to about +2 EV.

Hugh Park 2

A second shot from High Park in Toronto. My grandson Sasha and his is mom and dad, love to go here on warm sunny days for picnics. It is also a great place for photography, and I make it a habit to visit the park when I travel to TO. As I do more and more photography, I think my style is changing, and may even evolve to an even more personal style. I think it is natural to do that  as I begin to see images differently. I try to make them more balanced as a complete image, by excluding extraneous elements that don't really contribute to the overall scene. Cropping can do this during post processing, but the challenge is to see this final image  the moment the shot is taken, but this does not always happen. This image is the complete frame, with no cropping involved, and I am quite happy with it.

High Park

In 2010 we were in Toronto, at High Park, a very beautiful park north of the Queensway, and south of Bloor. The light was quite beautiful this afternoon, and the greens were stunning. This scene reminds me of an impressionist painting, with the activity of the families relaxing on a warm sunny day in France.The silhouettes of the trees against the backlit sunny field gives the image a strong focus. The people in the scene are secondary, but they add to the story of an afternoon outing. This was shot with my Leica M9, and the outstanding  color rendition is typical of his camera. This is one reason I really love this camera.

Abstract

Recently, I have been thinking more of taking abstract images, and seeing what i can do with them. Slightly out of focus, over exposed a bit, and some nice rendering results. I have to be careful that highlights don't get totally blown out, but a little pure white doesn't hurt. These are the kind of shots you can shoot in your own backyard.

Balance in a Composition

Another image that I looked back on, about 1 year after I took it. I cropped it somewhat, and I really like the result. Quite nice tonality, and again we have the red - green color vibration. Cropping it in the square format really helps to make the image. One of my favorite photographers  is Mark Dubovoy. A tip he gives is to avoid taking images that he calls "postcard images", or types of images that are very common in composition. I try to follow that advice. The original image was a "postcard" image. Cropping it in the square format, and zooming in changed the feeling of the image totally. The bush is supported by the root and stem below, and this gives a feeling of balance. Without that shape below, the same impact would not have resulted. Centering the bush in the square is also very important. The square format resulted in an interesting overall shape, and quite often I do not allow the original 35 mm format dictate how I want to present my image.

Abstract

I like abstract art. It is quite easy to find images in nature that are abstract. Most often I find them in a shot that I had taken, but somewhere within the original image. This is a crop of a shot that I really did not care for, and often I would look at it, and leave it. Tonight, I decided to do a crop within the original, and this is the result. It may not appeal to everyone, and this is the nature of abstract art. That little dark area in the center draws your eye into the center of the image. So the eye does not wander all over the place within the image. A good photograph or painting always has some obvious abstract element to it. In fact the way to see if an image,whether a painting, drawing or other, has a flaw, is to turn the image on its side, or upside down. The flaw will be immediately apparent. It is the abstract element of the work that makes this stand out.