Kania

I did a photoshoot with Kania G. on Tuesday and it was a ton of fun! We went to the West Jordan City Park and played around with shadows, light, and umbrellas. I saw an adorable photo done by Susan Monson Photography with an umbrella and I wanted to try and replicate the effect. This is my favorite photo of the shoot (and possibly of my life):


Thanks for such a good shoot, Kania!

Date to Timpanogos

This weekend, we drove up Timpanogos canyon and took some pictures. I like going on dates where the main objective is to take pictures. :)

Bella, no?

We saw some cute little critters! We drove up a crazy dirt road and saw some amazing mountain scenery:

Beautiful! I love the mountains. My brother-in-law is very careful in his pronunciation of that word.. it makes me smile. He says it mountain. None of this Utah soft-T thing, nosirree.

It kind of makes me sad when people carve their names into trees. It reminds me of Fern Gully every time I see one. Only not that specific clip. The "Can't you feel its pain?" part.

The name is Batty, the logic is erratic... :)

Here it is! Go to 8:20 or so and laugh with me.

Peter took this one and then started singing Lady Gaga.

He's on the edge of glory! The edge of glory also happens to be the edge of a river that is very, very cold. He slipped after a few minutes and his legs went super numb. And he was already wet, so why not get into the lake?

This is Silver Lake! I think it's probably 40 degrees in there. Brr. Obviously, I was not enticed to enter.


It was sure pretty, though! And then...... the raccoon!

As we're driving along, we see something on the edge of the road. We stopped the car when we saw it was a raccoon! And not a big raccoon, either -- it was a baby! I took a bazillion pictures and then it crawled out into the road. And under our car. I got out to try and scoot it away and it just crawled further under. It took a little bit, but we finally got him out. I was kind of worried about him not having a mom to teach him that cars are bad. But, what do you do?

Anyway. I'm going to go and finish the laundry and eat lunch. Also, watch more Avatar.

xo -- eo

Bokeh

Some of you have asked what bokeh is... so I'm going to show you!

Admittedly, I'm not an expert on this, so I'll send you to someone who actually knows what she's talking about first. :) Here's a really good explanation of bokeh and some amazing bokeh pictures. The Pioneer Woman is easily my favorite blogger ever.

Okay, so now for the inexpert explanation! Basically with a camera lens, there's a little hole that lets in the light. This is the aperture. The bigger you make the aperture, the fuzzier the background is. It lets you focus really well on your main subject and separates them from the stuff behind them (aka "depth of field"). So, basically, bokeh is just when the background fuzzes into beautiful little bubbles of color.

Like this!

This is bokeh by itself. Obviously, you wouldn't want to hang that up in your living room -- bokeh exists to showcase things, objects, foregrounds... otherwise it just kind of looks like you got the wrong glasses prescription.

All I did with these was manually adjust the focus on my lens. Twist until fuzzy, then click. If you have a point-and-shoot, you can achieve a similar effect by using the macro function, getting your camera to focus on something up close (hold the button down halfway until a green light appears) and then move the camera and look at something else before you click it. It basically does the same thing.

There's the same-ish picture in focus. The horse moved. Darn horse.

Obviously, that's a boring foreground.. but for the sake of bokeh, it's nice. See how the background isn't just fuzzy, it's almost bubbly? That's bokeh.

Again with the awful foreground (really should have picked something that was a different color than the background) but I LOVE the bokeh in this one! The light and the green played really nicely together.

Weird focus, but love the bokeh. Are you noticing how different colors make it look better? The more variation you have in the background (with light, of course) the more interesting the bokeh is.

Last grass bokeh, promise. I like how the bokeh isn't quite circular on parts of this. The lighter foreground on the darker background also makes the focus pop (haha, good job, self!). But, but, see how the bokeh isn't as intense in this one as in the last one? That's cause this one is directly in the sun, while in the previous one the sun was at a different angle. Lesson learned: move around a lot.

I go back and forth with this one. It isn't quite bokeh, but I like it anyway. Do you see how the flowers that are in "focus" (I know it's blurry) look further away from the fuzzy background? That's why we use the bigger aperture. Fuzziness and distance.

While the bokeh isn't as intense in this one, it still achieves the desired effect: puts the focus directly on the subject (in this case, the pretty purple flowers) and puts "distance" between the background and the foreground.

That, in a nutshell, is bokeh! Make more sense now?

Now go out and take pictures! Make bokeh! Then show them to me! (really, if you have bokeh pictures, I want to see them. We could start a facebook group for bokeh-addicts.)

xo -- eo