While giving the dogs a run in the woods the other day, I found some interesting dead vines, twisted, knotted, and holding dew left from the morning fog. Luckily, I had brought my camera, and I started taking a couple shots with a fairly shallow DOF. In the LCD, I noticed how the branches in the background were dispersing the sun light, creating a slight bokeh...
So, I made a mental note to return before the challenge ended.
As typical, I waited until almost too late. I got down the trail just about 45 minutes before sunset. I also brought a spray bottle to make my own dew drops. The knotted vines produced some interesting images, especially shooting up towards the naked upper reaches of the trees--that produced some really nice bokeh.
I tried all three of my lenses: 28-80, 75-300, and my 100 macro; none but the 28-80 at 80 produced any bokeh (at least under these conditions).
As I changed lenses back to the 28-80, I turned and started shooting towards the sun. It looked like it would be great; unfortunately, the trees were too dense to get any decent lighting to come through.
Now, it got interesting. I'm in the woods and running out of light. I had to find a place with enough light coming through to catch it, but not so much as to wash everything out. (To make it more fun, I had both the dogs with me...so, we were all running wildly through the woods.)
I finally found an opening and found a branch that I could spray down. This was a real treat, shooting handheld and manually focusing. I only got off about 15 shots before running out of sun.
Post-processing was very straight forward. Cropped, a little healing on the sun bokeh, adjusted levels, added adjustment layers for brightness/contrast and hue/saturization. Added a duplicate layer and multiplied, then sized and saved for web. Finally, added a touch of NeatImage to take a bit of grain out of the bokeh.
Here is the out-of-camera original used to produce this image:
Just to prove to myself that the image wasn't a fluke, I went back to the woods a couple mornings later in an attempt to recreate the image. That effort produced this original:
from which I culled the cropped image:
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Place: 14 out of 241 Avg (all users): 6.4036 Avg (commenters): 8.4000 Avg (participants): 6.2051 Avg (non-participants): 6.6226 Views since voting: 3608 Views during voting: 434 Votes: 223 Comments: 29 Favorites: 17 (view)
Jeez, I wish I'd voted on this. I would have put it high! This is really lovely. Very pretty bokeh, and as mentioned earlier in the comments, integral to the image. Great idea. Now I wanna do it ;)
This is a terrific shot, and so much better for reading about your adventure. It's really nice to see one of these water drop reflecty shots taken outside a studio :).
thank you all for your wonderful and generous comments! this challenge was a lot of fun, especially considering all the hand-wringing before and during about just what was meant by 'bokeh'. there was some really great photography, as well as some really great bokeh. i congratulate all! thank you!
I had this picked for the top three. A beautiful capture. I love the reflection.
Adding: The bright red circle, imo, was too pronounced. I love all your untouched originals. They're gorgeous!
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