IKnow:Bokeh

Bokeh, also known as “Boke” is one of the most popular subjects in photography. The reason why it is so popular, is because Bokeh makes photographs visually appealing, forcing us to focus our attention on a particular area of the image. The word comes from Japanese language, which literally translates as “blur”.

Cpatured by Usama Moin @ Inovativ Studios

1) What is Bokeh?
Basically, bokeh is the quality of out-of-focus or “blurry” parts of the image rendered by a camera lens – it is NOT the blur itself or the amount of blur in the foreground or the background of a subject. The blur that you are so used to seeing in photography that separates a subject from the background is the result of shallow “depth of field” and is generally simply called “background blur”. The quality and feel of the background/foreground blur and reflected points of light, however, is what photographers call Bokeh.

2) Good and Bad Bokeh
Remember, bokeh is rendered by the lens, not the camera. Different lenses render bokeh differently due to unique optical designs. Generally, portrait and telephoto lenses with large maximum apertures yield more pleasant-looking bokeh than cheaper consumer zoom lenses. For example, the Nikon 85mm f/1.4D lens produces exceptionally good-looking bokeh, while the Nikon 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6G DX lens produces poor bokeh at the same focal length and aperture – all due to differences in optical designs of both lenses. Again, I am not just talking about the background blur; all lenses are capable of producing out of focus blur, but not all lenses are capable of rendering beautiful bokeh.
So, what is a good or beautiful bokeh? A good bokeh pleases our eyes and our perception of the image and therefore, the background blur should appear soft and “creamy”, with smooth round circles of light and no hard edges.
Bad Bokeh
If there is a bad bokeh the quality of the blur is not pleasant to the eye, with sharp edges of the circles and double lines.
3) Bokeh shapes
The shape of the reflected light in out of focus areas depends on the lens diaphragm. Many older lenses such as Nikon 50mm f/1.4D have 7 straight blades in their diaphragms, which results in heptagon-shaped bokeh.

Most new lenses, now come with 9 rounded blades, which render round bokeh (Nikon 105mm f/2.8G VR)

4) How to get good Bokeh
So, how do you get a good bokeh in your images? As I have pointed out above, bokeh depends on the type of lens you are using. While lower-end consumer zoom lenses will yield unpleasant bokeh, fixed (prime) lenses and most professional zoom lenses with fast apertures yield good-looking bokeh. Do you know if your lens produces good bokeh? Try this: focus on an object from a very close distance (as close as the lens will allow, keeping the object in focus), making sure that there are no objects at least 5-6 feet behind it. Make sure to be on the same level as the object itself, so that you are not looking down on it. Do not use a plain wall as your background – try to find a colorful background, preferably with some lights on it. A Christmas tree is a perfect background for a bokeh test. Once you find a good test subject with a suitable background, set your camera to “Aperture Priority” mode and set your aperture to the lowest number. On most consumer zoom lenses, the lowest aperture is typically f/3.5, while on prime and professional zoom lenses, it can be between f/1.2 and f/2.8. Once the aperture is set to the lowest value, take a picture of your subject and take a look at the rear LCD of your camera. The subject should be in focus, while the background is blurred. If you have a good lens, the bokeh should be soft and fuzzy, looking pleasing to the eye. The circular reflections should be round and soft, with no hard edges.
5) What lenses create great bokeh?
There are many lenses that create great-looking bokeh. Most fast prime lenses with round-blade apertures such as Nikon 85mm f/1.4D or Canon 85mm f/1.2II USM create exceptionally good-looking bokeh. The lower-cost version of the same lens – Nikon 85mm f/1.8D and Canon 85mm f/1.8 USM also produce beautiful bokeh. One of the lens which can be used for beautiful bokeh is the Nikon 50mm f/1.4G, but be careful about the older Nikon 50mm f/1.4D or the 50mm f/1.8D, since they both produce heptagon-shaped bokeh. There are too many lenses to list, so I recommend doing some more research on different lenses, based on your photography needs.
6) Examples of bokeh
Here are some examples of great-looking bokeh:

IShoots: Jawwad's Shoot

Photo Courtesy : Ammar Mansuri @ Inovativ Studios

IKnow:Light painting photography

Light painting is a photographic technique in which exposures are made by moving a hand-held light source or by moving the camera. The term light painting also encompasses images lit from outside the frame with hand-held light sources.

Camera painting might be thought of as light painting in reverse. With light painting the camera is usually steady or on a tripod and light, such as a flashlight, is then waved, painted and drawn in the air. While with camera-painting, however, the camera moves across lights that are usually stationary. Your particular type of camera movement results in patterns or lines that create an abstract composition.

Digital photography makes it easy to 'camera-paint'. You move your camera to paint lights -- which is not just a phrase, it is exactly what you will be doing. It's a lot of fun and really exciting when you get a colorful composition.

A variety of light sources can be used, ranging from simple flashlights to dedicated devices like the Hosemaster, which uses a fiber optic light pen.Other sources of light including candles, matches, fireworks, lighter flints, glowsticks, and Poi are also popular.

A tripod is usually necessary due to the long exposure times involved. Alternatively, the camera may be placed on or braced against a table or other solid support. A shutter release cable or self timer is generally employed in order to minimize camera shake. Color Gels can also be used to color the light sources.

Source:Wikipedia

IExperiments:Abstract photo idea

Find out how to make stunning abstract photos at home by mixing oil and water with a simple, colourful backdrop.

Image by Ben Brain

If you look closely at the world around you, you’ll often find great ideas for photographs where you least expect them. Take this striking abstract image, for example, which was inspired by watching oil floating on the surface of water while preparing spaghetti one day.

The circles of oil formed attractive circular patterns and shapes in their own right, but here we tried to add some vibrant colour into the creative mix.

Exploiting the properties of refraction we took our oil and water off the hob and into a shallow glass dish suspended on two small boxes.

Underneath the glass we placed some coloured paper(any thing which is colourful can be used) that we 
lit with an off-camera flash (a simple table lamp will also work). The colours from the paper were picked up by the oily circles and created wonderful patterns, colours and shapes.

This is a great photography project at any time of the year, but now the days have become shorter, colder and darker you can easily set this up in the comfort of your home.

If you choose the right colours, the oily circles can take on a wonderfully festive appearance too, perfect for a seasonal screen saver or even a framed abstract to grace your walls. So read on to find out how it’s done…

01 Get ready to shoot
Fill a clean shallow glass dish with about 2-5cm of water. Support the dish so that it’s 10-20cm away from the coloured card – use small boxes to elevate it. Drop some cooking oil onto the water a few drops at a time and watch as the bubbles separate into attractive circles that refract the colours below.

02 Camera settings
To light the coloured paper on the table top, use an angle-poise lamp or a flashgun fired with a remote trigger. Support your camera so it’s close to the surface of the liquid. We reversed the central column of a tripod, so the camera ‘hung’ above the water. Use a macro lens and focus manually.

03 Multiple exposures
Experiment and move the oil around until you get the circles in the right position. Take lots of shots and try using different coloured backgrounds.You can combine   as much shots as you want like the three of shots have been used to create one image using layers 
and Blending Modes in Photoshop, which enhanced the sense of depth.

8 ways that organising your photos can reduce your stress

Clutter causes stress. Or, rather, it contributes to it. So reducing the amount of clutter in your life will help decrease the overall chaos of the daily grind – and an easy place to start this process is with something that makes you happy, such as photography. Here’s how you can clean up your photo management process and getting into a routine where you organize your photos in a more sensible manner.

1. Find a central storage point

The problem you’ve had up until now is that you’re not organizing photos per se; rather, you’re accumulating them. Stop letting photos pile up wherever there is room for them and create one big space for them where everything gets filed. This could be an internal drive on your computer, or an external drive. But any good photo management plan starts with a primary storage point.

2. Get rid of your outdated storage units

Still using Zip drives and floppy disks? Or more accurately, do you have photos languishing on these devices in the back of a drawer. Buy the necessary USB cables or devices to retrieve your images from these Paleolithic units and then toss them away forever!

3. Wipe your memory cards

How often do you download the images from your memory card after a shoot? Of course you don’t! No one does. Most people let their cards fill up, then once full, switch to another that’s lying around. Stop this immediately. Copy your photos from these cards into your central storage point (we’ll worry about organizing these photos later) and re-format your card.

4. Clean up any stray images

Like dust (or raisins, if you have kids), it’s amazing the places images turn up. Next we’re going to want to try and locate any stray images on your computer and move those into your primary folder.

For starters, perform a global search on your computer for files ending with .jpg, .tif, .png or any image file suffix you may use. If any turn up, move them into your central folder.

5. Don’t forget about email attachments

Did you know that the average person will have 43,000 images in their email account over the course of a lifetime?

OK, so that might not be true. Or maybe it could be, but the point is we accumulate a lot of images in emails over the years. Most of them aren’t worth saving, but the occasional family Christmas snap from your mother or pictures from your child’s pre-school you might want to hang on to. Filter your images by attachments, choose the ones you want to save and then download them into your central folder.

6. Put your photo management software to work

By now you’ll have a large pile of pictures in one folder and you can rest somewhat easier now knowing that half of the great battle of organizing your photos is done! Now it’s time to put your photo management software to work.

Whatever photo management software you’re using, most – if not all – will organize photos by date. This may not be how you ultimately choose to organize your photos, but it can serve as a nice starting point for making sense of your large pile of pictures.

More sophisticated photo management software can recognize faces and filter your pictures this way. But it’s up to you and what you shoot to decide how your photos should be organized.

If you shoot landscape photography, for instance, you may wish to organize images by location. But filtering them first by date will help you spread that pile out a bit and get a sense of what you have so you can make a more informed decision about photo management strategies.

7. Back it up. All of it
Perhaps the most important step here. Once you have your images stored all in one place, and you’ve organize them in a manner that makes more sense… back it all up so you don’t have to do it again!

We’re far enough into the digital age that we don’t need to explain why you need to back up your files. Just make sure you do it. Regularly. Consider cloud storage if you want to be able to access your back-ups anywhere.

8. Make a photo management strategy… and stick to it
Now that you’ve cleaned up some of your past laziness, work out a photo management strategy organizing photos you take from this point on. There’s no sense in doing everything we’ve listed here if you’re just going to fall back into old routines.

Get in the habit of downloading your images to your central folder straightaway. Perhaps even consider getting one of the wireless SD cards that lets you transfer photos to your computer over Wi-Fi. Whatever it takes to keep those cards clean!

Next, get in the habit of tagging photos in a way that makes sense with your folder structure and how you’ve chosen to organize your photos. Maybe your landscapes are tagged by continent or country, for instance. Some photo management software will even let you pin locations on a map.

You can also start using your software to star-rate your images to help filter out the hits from the misses.

Canon memory card compatibility chart

Which memory cards can be used in your Canon DSLRs? Check out our Canon memory card compatibility chart and find out!

Like many, you may have got a new camera or bought one. Maybe you got a shiny new Canon 60D to replace your old Canon 450D, but intend to hang on to the latter as your back-up camera. You’ll want to buy some new memory cards that are compatible with both cameras.

Both Canon cameras are fully compatible with SD (SecureDigital) and SDHC (SD High Capacity) cards. It’s not worth bothering with SD cards as they have a 2GB capacity limit, whereas SDHC cards are available in capacities of up to 32GB. This is much more useful considering the Canon 60D’s larger image resolution and bigger file sizes, as well as for video.

For more about which memory cards are compatible with your EOS camera, we’ve put together a handy Canon memory card compatibility chart listing all the current and discontinued Canon cameras, which lists the type of memory card each uses.

SDHC cards are the most common Canon memory card format and use a Fat32 file system.

However, SDXC (eXended Capacity) cards use a different exFat file system. These are available in capacities of 64GB and higher, but they aren’t compatible with some of the older Canon DSLRs like the 450D or Canon 500D.

Another factor is that many of the latest SDHC and SDXC cards use a new UHS-1 (Ultra High Speed) bus. This offers the potential of super-fast data transfer speeds with cameras that are UHS-1 compliant. However, they’re also fully compatible with non-UHS-1 cameras.

Currently, only the Canon 5D Mark III, 650D and EOS M support the UHS-1 bus but it’s likely that all future models that use SDHC/XC cards will feature this

Whether they have UHS-1 or not, it’s best to buy SDHC/XC cards that have a specification of at least Class 10, which deliver a sustained write speed of at least 10MB/s.

These are now barely any dearer to buy than slower Class 6 or Class 4 cards, and they’re easily fast enough for full HD video recording and sustained stills shooting in burst mode.

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