Bokeh Lights

   Bokeh is when the lights in a photo become big round circles, and it looks really neat. To do so, you need to put your camera at its lowest aperture. I used f/1.8. Then put the whole photo out of focus, or just focus on a select object, causing the background to big out of focus. This will make the lights into the round circles that look so cool.

   I recently learned on Pinterest that you can change the shape of the lights from round to whatever shape you want. To do this, you take some dark colored card stock, cut it in a circle the size of your lens, and then punch out a shape in the middle. This will cause the lights to be the shape of the cutout. So I decided to do a butterfly shape one, and one with a triangle design. 
These are my very hi-tech hoods for my lens:

And this is how it turned out:

Pretty cool, huh?

Merry Christmas (Part 2 | A new lens!)

   So for Christmas this year, one of my gifts from my parents was a 50mm f/1.8 fixed lens. I was/still am so excited about it! Because the aperture is f/1.8, it means that I can make the depth of field really shallow in my photographs, and therefore the focus is very selective. I love this quality in a photograph, especially for portraits. I immediately tried out the lens, and here are the results!

A series of Alice's feet; she was really into me photographing them...

Martha with her new pipe cleaner reindeer antlers, given to her by Alice.

Martha sporting her antlers

Merry Christmas! (Part 1)

  These are some photos I took of Christmas decorations around our house this past weekend, before I got my new lens, enjoy!

Monochromatic Still Lifes

            For my midterm portfolio, I chose to compile a six-image portfolio of monochromatic still lifes. Each photo was of a different scene in which every object in the scene was the same color. The colors I chose to photograph were red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple. I chose these colors because I thought they encompassed the six basic colors, and therefore would provide enough variety in my images. I decided on these final six images because I wanted to have a range of tight, medium, and wide shots. I also wanted to have some images be portrait and some landscape orientations.  I feel as though I successfully managed to do this.

            Often times when people think of a scene with all one color, they may imagine it being unappealing, due to everything being the same color. I hope that my portfolio will illustrate to the viewer that objects can stand apart, and be visually interesting in a monochromatic scene. Even though everything in the scene is the same color one can still pick out individual objects. The scene merges together as one, but it does not just become a single blur of color.  

Thanksgiving

   I have been meaning to post pictures from Thanksgiving, and I finally got around to doing it! So here are some belated photos from Thanksgiving...

I feel like this next few photos just describe my sister perfectly...

My instagrammed picture of the pies I made