How to Produce Background Blur

What sometimes grabs our eye in a photo is the contrast in detail between one or more objects in a photo. This is commonly referred to as bokeh or background or foreground blur. There is that element in photography which we immediately recognize because this is exactly how we tend to see things naturally and when we see this in an image it grabs our attention. But how do we produce this most powerful photographic effect?



There are more than one element involved in this. First and most importantly your subject should minimally be a pleasing-to-the-eye subject and better yet a strong one. Here we have a most unusual subject, an old steel wheel off a farm implement no longer used. Rusty, hardly even noticed in a run-down farm field most passers-by would not give it a second glance. It is just another worn down piece of junk from days gone by. But when photographed using bokeh, it commands 1st place attention. The fact that this is in B&W may help a bit more to some, but the primary ingredient is the subject placement in the lens, or the sensor's field of view.

Can this be done with any camera? Well yes but perhaps not quite as well. The camera can capture this even if it is a consumer point & shoot pocket sized one, but the true effect is best captured using a Wide Zoom Lens and at the longest telephoto length. Say you are using a 17-40 zoom. The fact that it is fairly wide, 17mm coupled with it being in the longest length produces the very best bokeh possible. However in the above photo this can also be accomplished with a mid-range zoo as it was captured using a 70-200mm lens at an F-stop of 9 and a zoom length of 200. And further as I mentioned above this can involve the foreground or background blurred, in this particular case I have produced a blur in both. You see only a very tight range, for this subject, in the middle as pertains to it's Depth of Field.





Now here is another using a consumer level point & shoot, a Canon PowerShot S2 IS, captured at an F stop of 3.5 and a focal length of only 21mm. Imagine how much more blurry this would have been if the camera was able to capture it at a longer length, or I had backed up more & then refocused on just the pine flowers. So you see this technique of creating bokeh can be a regular part of your shooting expertise by simply using a couple of factors.

New Years: A time to Defrag your Hard Disk Drive

Prior to doing this make sure you have all of your work backed up, preferably on another HDD (Hard Disk Drive)or on DVD. Only then will you feel like soaring.



As 2008 runs out of steam, and 2009 is about to emerge, we are faced with some of the same challenges as well as some added ones. In considering these I always look at what I have done to my PC in adding tons of image files. If I had to consider only these images I should be Analyzing & Defragging our HDD's every 30 days. But there is so much more to consider when it comes to how well our PC's work.

Consider that every upload, every download, every file added or deleted, every profile change on your pc, every screensaver added or changed or deleted, every email written, received, read & trashed, then dumped, in short, every action a PC takes has potential for losing bits of data, albeit small amounts, but these add up. Now let's add what we do to our images; my workflow includes ingesting the files into my image browser, I use Adobe's Bridge, and adding the metadata, keywording, starring the ones I like, deleting the one's I don't, then naming the folders & opening and saving each image I wish to work on that I feel has potential for use on a magazine page or in an online gallery for sale and then by necessity, changing the actual format from Raw to whatever the market demands, JPG, TIF PNG and so on.

Each of these workflow actions acts also to defrag tiny amounts of data while we are organizing them. So if it were for only this we need to analyze and defrag our HDD's monthly. But as mentioned above it is for everything we do on our PC's that demand we continue to practice good management methods on a very regular schedule.

Oh what a pain you say. Yes there are some painful steps taken and you must not allow anyone on the PC when it is happening, meaning you can't check your email or go shopping or upload photos or download music, etc. While it is true that it is without a doubt best that you consider you PC OFF_LIMITS during the process, you can briefly and occasionally interrupt the defragging, by simply clicking on the Pause button. I hear it is fine to do this, just don't overdo it. Here I am adding the Overview directly from the Window's 'Microsoft Management Console:


Disk Defragmenter overviewDisk Defragmenter analyzes local volumes and consolidates fragmented files and folders so that each occupies a single, contiguous space on the volume. As a result, your system can access files and folders and save new ones more efficiently. By consolidating your files and folders, Disk Defragmenter also consolidates a volume's free space, making it less likely that new files will be fragmented. The process of consolidating fragmented files and folders is called defragmentation.

The amount of time that defragmentation takes depends on several factors, including the size of the volume, the number and size of files on the volume, the amount of fragmentation, and the available local system resources. You can find all of the fragmented files and folders before defragmenting them by analyzing the volume first. You can then see how fragmented the volume is and decide whether you would benefit from defragmenting the volume. For step-by-step instructions describing how to analyze or defragment a volume, see To analyze a volume and To defragment a volume.

Disk Defragmenter can defragment volumes that are formatted with the file allocation table (FAT) file system, the FAT32 file system, and the NTFS file system.

OK now that you have read this all that is left is to pick a time when you are not likely to need your PC. I like analyzing, which normally should'nt take more than 10-20 minutes (only a guideline) then starting the Defragmentation just before hitting the rack. Here's the steps you'll need to take to perform this necessary task (I apologize to Mac users as this is strictly for the PC environment):

Here is the most common route; Start> All Programs> Accessories> System Tools> Disk Defragmenter. Another route is Control Panel> Performance and Maintenance> Administrative Tools> Computer Management> Storage> Disk Defragmenter> Analyze, then Defragment. What you most likely will see are Red, Blue, Green and White vertical bars all across the top bar left to right. What you want to see is mostly Blue and a lot of White. In order to get there Micorosoft recommends the following:

To open Disk Defragmenter, click Start, point to All Programs, point to Accessories, point to System Tools, and then click Disk Defragmenter.

You must be logged on as an administrator or a member of the Administrators group in order to complete this procedure. If your computer is connected to a network, network policy settings might also prevent you from completing this procedure.
You should analyze volumes before defragmenting them. This tells you whether you need to take the time to defragment them.
A volume must have at least 15% free space for Disk Defragmenter to completely and adequately defragment it. Disk Defragmenter uses this space as a sorting area for file fragments. If a volume has less than 15% free space, Disk Defragmenter will only partially defragment it. To increase the free space on a volume, delete unneeded files or move them to another disk.
You cannot defragment volumes that the file system has marked as dirty, which indicates possible corruption. You must run chkdsk on a dirty volume before you can defragment it. You can determine if a volume is dirty by using the fsutil dirty query command. For more information about chkdsk and fsutil dirty, see Related Topics (I'll add here that I know nothing of this utility so I avoid it, this is not a recommendation that you avoid it).

The time that Disk Defragmenter takes to defragment a volume depends on several factors, including the size of the volume, the number and size of files on the volume, the percentage of fragmentation in the volume, and available system resources.

You can defragment only local file system volumes, and you can run only one instance of Disk Defragmenter at a time.
To interrupt or temporarily stop defragmenting a volume, click Stop or Pause, respectively.

If you start Disk Defragmenter while performing a backup, Disk Defragmenter stops.

Ok that's about it. Then hopefully your PC (or Mac) will run faster and cleaner once this is done. And know that once done this becomes an easy routine to manage monthly. It should become one of the most common PC Maintenance Tools we use as Photographers. And while I am not a PC Guru, let me know if you have any questions. You can Comment below or go to About Me> About OutsideShooter for my email.

Merry Christmas Snow Shot

This is a shot of snow falling with the following body & lens settings:

F Stop/Aperture Value 4.0,
Shutter Speed 1 second
ISO 100
Focal Length 24mm (using a 24-105, 4.0L IS USM Canon)
Color Space Adobe RGB
Layer converted to mono

I took this using my outdoor security motion-detected light in it's 40watt lo-beam setting, hand held.

Makes for an interesting effect and is a much better capture once converted than in color as the lighting was very low. The only manipulation used after mono was a slight Curve adjustment. A lot more could be done with this but this is according to individual tastes.

Anyway I hope everyone is enjoying their Holiday.

Christmas Gifts, my Zazzle Products & more.......

OK you can stop Commenting as I have the 3 winners of a 5x7" photo of the image here. Thanks for entering & commenting on posts in my blog. You will receive your prints shortly after Christmas. Congratulations.






I've just recently opened a shop and here is one of the images I've been using to prepare gifts for Christmas. If you see anything you'd like me to create just let me know. There is no extra charge for customizing to your needs. But you'd better hurry if you want get this by Christmas. And thanks for linking to my new site.

The first 3 to arrive & Contact Me with a message that you have commented on a post or article here, and Pasted the url to your Comment, will receive a free 5x7" print (sure they're small but...they're free) of the above photo. You'll receive this in time for Christmas only if you are a rapid Commenter. I will also need a photo of you to add to my winner's Post on December 27th. Gooooooood Luck.

Sorry this only applies to those in the contiguous US, unless you cover postage.

Just for the Fun

While shooting from the base of Mt St Helens in Sept of this year I caught a movement to my left, as did it of me. Since the mountain had little snow, I chose this as my subject for the outing.

And by the way, don't forget the batteries this Christmas: Batteries.com

Should you delete from memory card in-camera?

Deleting images in camera

There has over the years been a lot of discussion about the safety or lack of same as involves deleting images from a memory card, be they Compact Flash, SD or any other format. It has to do with whether file corruption from the deletion can cause the next image to overwrite in a corrupted fashion. And that it is safer to download all images as is, even if you don't like them onto your PC, then deleting them as you view them in your camera's download software application.

I have done it both ways and while I cannot find any instances of overwrite corruption in either fashion of deleting images, whether in-camera or in-pc, the common consensus is to finish out a card, then remove & replace with another memory card. There is evidence that deleting & overwriting can occasionally corrupt the next file, and that next file, that next image could have been your best shot of the day. From all I have read though, and from all the photographers I have discussed this with, this concern is no more valid than an occasional corruption occurring from mere re-format corruption (a not so common yet normal part of preparing the memory card for receiving another round of file writing) which rarely occurs when deleting all the data on a card by zeroing out all the data on the card.

This is the more important concern. It is the re-formatting of the card that is of most concern. Should this be done in-PC or in-camera? Here you will find that most all professional photographers (and I have not spoken to a single one which disagrees with this) agree that reformatting in-PC is far riskier than reformatting in-camera. The reason involves using one software approach over another. It is reasonably assumed that by reformatting in-camera it is done utilizing the camera manufacturer's format technology rather than using the PC technology. And because of that it is nearly every proffessional's work habit to always re-format the card in-camera.

So if you find that you are out shooting and are close to running out of card space, feel free to delete and overwrite as you need. The chance of file corruption is minimal, certainly not enough to keep an unacceptable shot while missing the opportunity to gain one you will be happy with.

In addition you can easily backup online at Mozy Online Backup: 2GB
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