Below Beacon Hill 2

Messing around with multiple screw-on filters can cause vignetting - those black areas in the corners of the above photo. If I want to use the photo I will usually just crop it so these don't show. However, after looking at this photo a number of times I decided not to crop the vignetting because in this case I like the effect. It might just be nostalgia. When I was very young and had serious wanderlust, those far away places with the strange sounding names were always, in imagination, viewed through a ship's porthole. Imagine waking up in the morning and looking through that magic circle to see the pyramids of Giza in the hot desert sunlight or Chimborazo rising in the mist. That wonderful circular frame still seems to me like the mind's eye.

Depth of Field

We had some sun and blue skies today but I got engrossed in some experiments indoors with regard to various lenses I own and depth of field. Today's photos were shot with the 90mm macro lens. On the left, with the lens open to its maximum aperture f2.8. On the right with the lens closed down to its minimum aperture f32. Below is midway between the two - f16. These are the images I expected to result but for me it was valuable to actually see the difference aperture size makes. In all these photos, the number "9" was nearest to the lens and the number "3" was most distant.

Blur

Ever since I started to take photos with a digital camera I have spent a lot of time and energy trying to get sharp images. It's a special challenge to do this digitally because the smallest unit of color digitally is a pixel whereas with film, the smallest unit is a molecule of whatever photosensitive chemical is used on the film. And, while a pixel is pretty small, a molecule allows for much finer detail. But along with this quest for increased sharpness I have grown aware of the beauty, variety and uses of blur and now, in addition to my ongoing search for increased sharpness, I also try to gain more control over blur. Today's photos are results of some recent attempts to produce a very shallow depth of field (lots of blur) by shooting with a wide aperture (between f1.4 and f4) and using a short extension tube. My underlying goal here was to isolate the subject of the photo by having everything else blurry. My favorite kind of blur is very smooth and creamy as in the photo above. But I also like the more patterned blur as in the photo below. Either, however, serves to isolate the subject of the photo and draw attention to it. The more proper photographic term for the out-of-focus areas of a photo is bokeh and Wikipedia has a good article on it.

Above is a species of Usnea lichen, probably Usnea filipendula. Below is the remains of a seed cluster from English Ivy (Hedera helix).