mud pies to medicine: Okay Bokeh Mokey

Saturday, January 7, 2012

Okay Bokeh Mokey

Bokeh is the word for the pretty blur a good camera can put in the out of focus area behind a subject. Sometimes this mean you just have some really blurry grass. Even when using a film camera, there is bokeh. A good example, next time you're watching a romantic movie and there is a close up of the couple eating dinner in a dimly lit courtyard with some lights behind them, check out the shape of those out of focus lights. Depending on the shape of the aperature diaphragm the out of focus lights will be sculpted into different shapes. By applying a filter, one can manipulate the bokeh so instead of taking the shape of the aperture diaphragm, it takes the shape of the filter. That was a lot of fancy talk that means, put a filter in front of your lens and the out of focus lights can be made into different shapes.

To achieve this effect it is good to have tiny point sources of light. This might be a city skyline or a strand of Christmas lights. So I stripped the tree (which I should take down anyway) and tacked the lights on the wall behind my subject. The first is shot with my 50mm f/1.4. You need a lens that will open really wide (low f stop) and portrait lenses are usually good for this; they are, after all, made for good bokeh like you see in portraits. The second is with a filter. Sound expensive? It cost me nothing. Just take some thick black paper (don't have any? I used an index card and permanent marker) and cut it into the size of your lens, cut a shape in the middle and tape over the lens. These are not the coolest I've ever done but I had some fun creating them. You can find some great bokeh tutorials online and resources about creating filters. There is this great site and it is called.... google. Just google it, bokeh tutorials are all over the place and I'm too lazy to find a good one for you.

#7 Piping Hot Cup of Love

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The inspiration you ask?

I miss making mud pies. There is this huge rock in my front yard. To call it a rock really does it a dishonor. It is a boulder, brought home by my father on a huge dump truck after he blasted it out of a work site. My mom one day told me that even though it is nearly 2.5 feet high, 6 feet long, and 2.5 feet wide, that it was, in fact, only half-showing. The scientist inside of me was disbelieving and set out to get some proof. Clad in a dress, bow in my hair, and my best accessory, a shovel, I trudged outside ready to prove my mother wrong. That is when the digging began. I dug, and dug, and dug, and nearly all 3.5 feet of Danielle fit in that hole when I had reached the bottom of the rock. That became my digging spot, my mud pie kitchen. Each day it was dug, and each evening it was filled back in. Sometimes the holes were small, sometimes they were enormous, and most days the hole was turned into my mud mixing bowl with that rock as my counter. The novelty never wore off. The ebb and flow of my childhood was, in many ways, measured by the ever-changing depth of that hole in the front yard, the hole that never really disappeared even each day after it was filled in. Even though the grass has grown back in that spot, there still remains, an indentation, the scars of a childhood well lived and the disbelieving scientists I have always been.

So, you ask me why I want to be a doctor? I do not want to be a doctor. I want to open a mud pie bakery with the cash register on that rock in my front yard. But, somehow, I doubt I would stay in business long, for the world seems to have lost its taste for mud pies. I guess being a doctor will have to do.