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:

Flowers are the sweetest things that God ever made and forgot to put a soul into. ~ Henry Beecher (1813-1887)

All photos here were shot hand held and wide open at f/2.8 using my macro lens with image stabilizer and natural light coming in from the window. All were taken in a high key mode and f/2.8 was used as I wanted to only emphasize certain part of the flower. Have a great week ahead everyone.