Aperture Blur Work Diary

How I Made These Images
To create these images I used a 18-55mm lens on a Nikon camera. This gave me a large range of F/Stops to chose from which allowed me to alter the depth of field largely whilst taking photographs. I used a shallow depth of field for a majority of these images which allowed me to have a small, sharp focal point contrasted with a large out of focus area.

Critical Evaluation

This image was not as successful as the other images. The reason for this is because of the conditions in which the image was taken. The weather was very windy which made the subject, the bush, shake. This made it very difficult to focus on one point to make the rest of the image blurred. Instead, when taking the photograph, the entire image was blurred, some parts more than others but never the less, the entire image was blurred. This image does therefore not fit the subject matter as there is no clear focal point.

When taking images like this in the future, I will keep the possible weather conditions in mind and will plan my photoshoots more thoroughly.


Progress

To edit all of these images I used Photoshop. A small range of tools were used.

This first image was hardly edited as I felt that the images was practically perfect to begin with. I only increased the saturation of the image very slightly.

This next image was edited heavily. I wanted to take away as many distractions from the focal point as possible; Therefore, I used the spot healing brush to eliminate all of the blemishes on the model's face. I chose to turn the image black and white for aesthetic reasons only.


This next image required very little editing. I simply only turned the image black and white for mainly aesthetic reasons only. However, by turning the image black and white, I found that the focal point becomes more dominant.

This image required a small amount of editing. As I felt that there was too much excess background within the image, I used the crop tool to edit out some of this background. This made the focal point of the image stand out more and also made the image more comfortable to look at. The reason I say that the image was uncomfortable to look at before is because of the amount of background within the image. The image looked disproportional with the background being more dominant than the hand. However, this is now fixed with the cropping process.

This final image was turned black and white, again, for aesthetic reasons only. However, as I mentioned before, I see the focal point of the image easier when the image is black and white which is the other reason as to why I turned the image black and white. I then finally used the crop tool to crop out a small portion of the right of the image so that it appeared perfectly composed.