does this boque(sp?) suck?

To me its really busy. Is there a special technique to get a more smooth background. take at f2.8 and iso 125

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kekoa wrote in post #5543688
To me its really busy. Is there a special technique to get a more smooth background. take at f2.8 and iso 125

The easiest special technique I know of for a smooth background is called poster board, and you can pick it up in whatever colour you like. You can even hold the poster board yourself if you use a tripod with wired/remote shutter release. Just be sure to angle it in such a way that you're not getting glare from the board.

If you want bokeh on a natural background you will get stronger bokeh at wide open aperatures (2.8 is good), and long focal lengths. Your ISO value is irrelevant for creating bokeh.

for me, the biggest problem isn't the background but that the flower is too centered.

ryan

For me the bigger problems would be the brightness of the upper central background and the very bright little piece there in the left margin.

Why shoot into the light source? That always puts you at a distinct disadvantage.

Robert_Lay wrote in post #5545048
For me the bigger problems would be the brightness of the upper central background and the very bright little piece there in the left margin.

Why shoot into the light source? That always puts you at a distinct disadvantage.

can you put that in lay-man's terms for me? I appreciate the feedback, but don't really understand what you are referring to when you say 'shooting into the light source'

thanks

One suggestion...

A telephoto lens would aid in reducing the back ground clutter by reducing the field of view.

Unless I am mistaken the source of illumination for the subject flowers is NOT from behind you. It is somehere on the other side of the subject, even if only slightly so. In other words, the flowers seem silhouetted.

Yes? No? Don't know?

To answer your question, the "bokeh" is the result of the lens itself or more specifically the number (and quality) of the shutter blades. More blades in the shutter, such as you find in higher quality lenses usually means a much softer bokeh and less blades such as in lower end lenses, means a harsher bokeh. In other words to get a really nice soft bokeh right off the camera, you usually need to use a good, high quality (and expensive) lens.

However...this is also quite easily fixed in post processing. I'm sure there are many techniques for this, but the way I usually do it is I separate the foreground (in this case the flowers) into a separate layer in Photoshop, then I just apply a little bit of blur to the background to soften things up...usually either "Gaussian blur" or "Lens Blur". I use Photoshop CS2 but I'm sure there are similar tools in other software packages. Just watch the edges of the foreground as if you add too much blur to the background you start to get a funky halo around the foreground from the blurring effect. After that, just flatten the image again and you're good to go. It's really as simple as that. In fact you could probably even just touch down the roughest areas with the blur tool itself.

Now I do agree that I think the crop here is more of an issue than the bokeh is. In this case I think I would have either gone with a much tighter crop with it in this horizontal position or I would have simply gone with a vertical composition instead.

Anyways, just my $.02 worth...hope it helps!
Peace,
Jim