Shape Bokeh

Then and Now

 Recreating photos from the past.

Black and White Reflections

My theme of my pictures is Noticing the Ignored. They are pictures of things I walk by everyday and would have never noticed I had not been looking for reflections. Since most of the photos were the reflections of windows, it added to the difficultness of noticing them. Whenever I look at windows I pay attention to what is behind the window, not what the window is reflecting. Because you’re able to see what is behind the window and what the window is reflecting, it gives the picture an almost double exposerd effect.

To make my photos black and white I edited them in Photoshop. Once I had the image opened I went under Layer -> New Adjustment layer -> Black and White. There I played around with the darkness of each colour to help make more contrast between some images softer or more dramatic.

I also added some vignette to some pictures. To do that I first used an ellipse tool to make the general shape of the vignette. Since it’s just a big black oval, I change the layer from combine shapes to subtract front shapes, reversing the oval, so the oval is of the picture and the border is all black. From there, I increased the feather so the contrast wouldn’t be so distinct. Sometimes when you adjust the feather the black disappears at some ends. To fix this I went under Edit -> Free Transform Path and adjust the width/length to help the black fit better. Finally I lowered the opacity the border to make the black more discrete.

   

         

               

Depth of Field

Bokeh 

I used two different technics for my two photos. For the first photo I used a wide aperture set my focus to manual. I made sure the the background of the leaf was fairly far back to maximize the background blur. For the second photo I used a camera with an AV setting and also manual focused on the spider.

Close Up 

For the Close up photos I manually focused the camera on my subjects and went into photoshop and went under Filter: Blur: Iris Blur: to help soften the background. I also purposely set up my photos with the backgrounds fairly close to the subjects to avoid any Bokeh.

Foreground out of Focus

In the Foreground out of Focus I just manually focused on a subject in the back for both photos. The hard part was trying to find a suitable subject. You could also used some blur filters in photoshop if you choose.