TIGS Weekly Photo Challenge

Nava

Level 3

« on: October 08, 2009, 02:59:46 PM »

The challenge for the current week of October 8 to October 15, 2009 is:

Street Portraits

Previous challenges:
October 8 to October 15, 2009: Bokeh
September 16 - October 1, 2009: Game Architecture

General Rules

This is a challenge, not a competition. Basically, there is no wrong answer. This is a weekly exercise to encourage people to use their cameras in new ways, to explore the world around them in images, to practice techniques, and to broaden approaches to photography in general.
Absolutely anyone with any camera is encouraged to participate.
Challenges will run for one week each.
Please try not to submit old photos. The point of this exercise is to get you out there, taking NEW pictures with NEW themes/styles/genres every single week.
There is no limit to how many pictures you can submit in a given week, so long as you stick to the week's theme.
If you're too late but have a great picture for an older challenge, please do not post them here but rather in the general Photography thread. We do not like to be distracted...
Every week, a new challenge will be posted in this thread by Nava, Jrsquee, or GregWS. There will be a link to each previous challenge in this main post.
If you've got an idea and you'd like to "host" the challenge one week, notify either Nava, Jrsquee, or GregWS (via PM or whatever other means) and we will leave the chair open to you on the next week. You can then post your challenge in this thread once the previous one ends.
Do not post a challenge if we haven't been notified or if the previous challenge hasn't yet ended. It will be deleted. And we will be disappointed in you.
If you want your submissions to be critiqued, just indicate so in your post.

Things that Should Not Even Need to be Stated

No explicit nudity.
No bashing another person's submissions.
No gigantic image files posted directly into the thread. Flickr is free and compresses images wonderfully while providing links to higher resolutions. Seriously.
HAVE FUN


« Last Edit: October 16, 2009, 09:14:50 PM by Nava »	Logged

pgil

Guest

Re: Photo Challenge #2 (Bokeh)

« Reply #1 on: October 08, 2009, 03:12:47 PM »

Ah, cool idea. I just took some photos for school that might feature some bokeh-type shapes. Got to start scanning.


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Jrsquee

Guest

Re: TIGs Weekly Photo Challenge

« Reply #2 on: October 08, 2009, 03:59:05 PM »

i'm game

time to set up the christmas lights!


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Nava

Level 3

Re: TIGs Weekly Photo Challenge

« Reply #3 on: October 08, 2009, 04:00:46 PM »

October 8 to October 15, 2009

Bokeh

Quote from: Wikipedia

Bokeh (derived from Japanese, meaning "blur" or "haze") is a photographic term referring to the æsthetic quality of the out-of-focus areas of an image produced by a camera lens using a shallow depth of field. Essentially, bokeh is an aesthetic and qualitative measure of light distortion in the out-of-focus areas of an image, and is primarily caused by lens aberrations and aperture shape... In out-of-focus areas, each point of light becomes an image of the aperture, generally a more or less round disc.

In layman's terms, bokeh are the little shapes of fairly solid color you sometimes get in an area of a photograph that is vastly out of focus and emitting/reflecting light. Bokeh are easiest to get (and maybe most drastic or apparent) when you have a sharp focus in the foreground and lights in the distance, as in my extremely cliché example photo:

However, that's not the only way to do it. You can set basically any shot up in such a way as to achieve this effect, with a little bit of planning.
All you'll need for this challenge is:

a "subject" with lots of depth to it, containing a foreground and a fairly distant background that will reflect light at your lens (this is important; an unreflective object in the distance will not show up as bokeh)
the ability to stop your camera down so that the lens opening is wider, or alternately just lots and lots and lots of depth

Increasing your aperture this way makes the depth of field shallower, which blurs out the non-focused elements, hopefully into Bokeh!
Note: smaller f.stop = bigger aperture = shallower depth of field = more bokeh. Play around with your camera's settings if possible

If you're worrying about your equipment's ability to do this, DON'T! Although some cameras do automatically set the aperture in silly ways to try to focus the majority of the objects in the the frame, many if not most point-and-shoots today come with at least a few manual options....
I used to have an old Fujifilm point-and-shoot that stopped down to an aperture of 2.8, and I had no problem getting bokeh, even with incredibly amateur skillz:

So, play around with your camera! Play around with different distances between foregrounds and backgrounds, or just play around with really out of focus lights. The possibilities here are endless; it's a simple technique that can render you some fairly interesting and artistic results.


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Nava

Level 3