caught the waning light glinting madly off a small pond - I had on me my 135mm with Soft Focus - I dialed it up to the highest level of soft focus, set the aperture wide open (f/2.8) and then focused on the trees in the foreground, and then ever-so-slightly defocused them. Just a little bit, since the soft focus would be doing its magic as well. I think the mechanism the soft focus lens uses to achieve the effect is what made those peculiar looking discs of light - not quite bokeh, but something just as interesting.
The image is a cropped detail of a larger image - here's the full view:
and an inversion of the cropped view that I seriously considered entering instead:
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I'm going through the entries, stopping at those images I feel have had the benefit of an unconventional eye and dwelling a little longer to try to see and appreciate what you saw. This is one of those images.
Positives: Great effect - looks like an intricate mosaic. I really like how we can find sharpness and blur in this image and how those elements are intermixed across the whole frame. The trees themselves offer a great primer for the image - we see the trees but the way the branches act to fragment the image is very effective.
Critical stuff: The dark band at the top of the image - this area doesn't really add much and actually detracts a little from the effect you have created.
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