Listen Visually

So here I am on the upper deck of my cabin watching this feisty little squirrel run around the branches of this pine tree, and I am trying to think of what to do to make a good, or maybe even a great, photo. This squirrel is going from pine cone to pine cone, sometimes eating them and other times dropping them to the ground. (How he remembers all the places where he puts them is really beyond me…) Anyway, back to the story. As I was looking at this one pine cone near the deck, I realized that it might just make a good photo. I shot it. Not so good. Too much depth of field. Too much information….  So I opened up the lens to 2.8, which was wide open for the 70-200 lens, and shot again. Much better. Now I decreased the information and got a wonderful bokeh.

Bokeh? What the heck is that?  It’s a Japanese word meaning blur. Kind of the aesthetic quality of the blur. The word actually describes the area where the background turns all soft and blurry. You often see it as lights in the distance that are blurred and sometimes even have the shape of the aperture on your lens. Anyway, the pine cone and pine bough looked great with the sweet “bokeh” in the background.  It was nice, but it still needed something.  The artist in me was saying that maybe it would look good as a watercolor, but I didn’t want to go into “Painter” and paint each part of the photo, so I cheated. The plug-ins available to photographers today just make me smile a lot.  More happy dances! Topaz Simplify is one of those fun plug-ins that can be used for specific things……and this was just the time and the place.  So now we have pine cone, pine bough, wonderful bokeh, and Topaz Simplify to give the water color-painted effect.  Ordinary into Extraordinary!