xdrive photography learning – 20 – bokeh

Within xdrive photography’s bokeh lesson, Raj notes that the unique blur within photographs known as bokeh is a composition tool that allows a photographer to guide a viewer’s eye as well as to keep distracting elements hidden.

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Nikon D750    f/3.2    1/320s   40mm   ISO100

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Nikon D750     f/5.6   1/320s   230mm   ISO 100

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Nikon D750     f/5.6   1/200   210mm   ISO 100

Over to you Raj.  Thank you for this informative lesson and your amazing images.

weekly photo challenge: a face in the crowd

The human body speaks…very loudly through its postures and movements.  More and more I’m finding that photographers who create street images from perspectives other than direct portraiture opens me to ponder individual humans stories that speak through the body’s emotional expressions which often are distracted from by a smile, an eye glimmer, a hair cut, a style of dress, etc.

images submitted in response to Erica’s photo challenge:  A Face in the Crowd

a weathered home

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Ricoh Caplio GX100     f/4.1    1/73s    7.3m

…Just beyond the field is a house weathered gray by the seasons and weakened by the stresses of time. In the golden rays of the morning light, the young girl is kicking up dust clouds, searching through the barren soil for seeds of her past, and desiring to be freed from yesterday’s delusions. She walks over to the side of the road and bends over; as she stands, I see three keys, dangling from her left hand. One key is silver, another is gold, and the third is made of diamonds. I feel the pain of fear awaken as the warmth of this early autumn day touches the frozen shield that embraces her heart

…literature provided me with alternate threads by which to darn a harmonious, yet delusional, understanding of death, of fatherless children, of a family. To move into this realm is to be cuddled in the arms of a chair, mesmerized by the pages of a book unfolding like an accordion, embraced by a transparent sound barrier, and transported into fantasies found through fictional characters. While my mind’s eye grasped the hand of my naïve emotional self and together we observed the telling of storied lives, there was a seeking mind that simultaneously identified revealing markers to create a map, not to a place of hidden treasures, but to a place that felt like a home.

B Catherine Koeford, A Meditative Journey with Saldage