I like shooting bokeh (the out of focus area of photographic image). I shot the above using the Panasonic GF1 and Minolta MD Rokkor f/1.7 lens. I bought the lens from eBay for US$ 40. The lens was probably manufactured in the early 1980s, based on my quick search on the internet.

I photographed this woman (you obviously can’t see it’s a woman) who was walking away from me in Chinatown against a very strong highlight. I purposely set the aperture to f/1.7 and the focusing distance to about 0.8 meters which caused the whole image to be out of focus because the subjects were way beyond 0.8 meters. I like the effect.

You can see the heart shape which is the symbol of love as we all know in the picture above. But what was the subject I used to shoot this? Read on to find out.

You can find many items at home to shoot if you are bored and with a bit of creative thinking (Note: I don’t claim that I am a creative person though), you can have lovely photos to grace the wall in your house. The ones I have here were shot using a macro lens with ambient lighting in my living room. No studio lighting at all, so you all can do this easily. The light came from the overhead fluorescent bulbs in my living room. And the subject is a book. Yes, a book.

First, open the book and divide it into two with each side having about the same number of pages. Use two pages from the left and right sides and bring them together by curling them toward the center to form a heart shape, like this:

I then placed the book on a sheepskin rug which I got from a friend of mine, but you can  use anything really, like a chair covered with white cloth, a table, a sofa, etc. I then placed a white styrofoam board as the background. My 100mm macro lens was set to shoot at its maximum aperture of f/2.8 and the ISO was 1000. The choice of ISO 1000 was necessary to give me fast enough shutter speed as I was shooting handheld. I could have used my tripod, but not this time. Even with ISO 1000, the shutter speed was only 1/60 sec. The f/2.8 aperture and the close shooting distance blurred everything except the part where I focused on and that’s the beauty of shooting macro. You can bring out something unusual and interesting out of something ordinary. I then played with the compositions to get the following two photos:

Now … how about the top photo? The one that gives you only the bright shape of the heart? As you can probably guess now, that one was shot by focusing on the far end of the book hence everything else including the book itself became out of focus. I actually looked for the focus point through that paper hole and on the fur of the sheepskin rug on the other end. Got what I mean? The bokeh (the out of focus portion of the photo) is now in front of the main subject, if I can say it that way. Play around with the compositions and the angle of your camera and shoot away and have fun. It may not be for everyone, but for those who like this kind of photo, go experiment with it. Have fun and share what you shoot in your blog and let me know too so I can have a look at them.

Here is another one:

Abstract bubble photography.

I spent couple of hours at home this afternoon to shoot these in my living room with the lighting coming only from the window. Enjoy and do let me know what you think. I will spend some time doing more abstract photography in the coming weeks while I am working on my next travel plan.

I could have cleaned up those tiny bubbles in Photoshop to make the image cleaner, but then I thought to just present them here as they are first. Maybe next time I cleaned them up. See more bubbles below.