Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Almost Invisible Bokeh



In photography, bokeh (BOH-kə, Japanese: [boke]) is the blur, or the aesthetic quality of the blur, in out-of-focus areas of an image, or "the way the lens renders out-of-focus points of light." Differences in lens aberrations and aperture shape cause some lens designs to blur the image in a way that is pleasing to the eye, while others produce blurring that is unpleasant or distracting—"good" and "bad" bokeh, respectively. Bokeh occurs for parts of the scene that lie outside the depth of field. Photographers sometimes deliberately use a shallow focus technique to create images with prominent out-of-focus regions.










Bokeh is not real the way a wild flower is real.

Even if a camera doesn’t take its picture
the wild flower is still out there in the wilderness
or turning a parking lot into wilderness
just by being a flower and just by being wild
and growing up through a crack in the parking lot.

Bokeh is light in the out-of-focus background
of a photograph, a kind of kaleidoscope
caused by the lens aperture and lens elements,
sometimes subtle, sometimes garish, kind of random
but always a construct of lens technology.

Bokeh is not real the way a wild flower is real.

I’ve always tried to be aware of depth-of-field.

I’ve always liked almost invisible bokeh.

The technology construct I want to create
is an image of wilderness, a flower, somewhere,
creating wilderness just by being wild there.

A kaleidoscope is just a trick played with light.










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A Behind-The-Scenes
Note: Coming Attractions



I usually don’t like to tease up-coming posts—because, you know, “We can never know about the days to come”—but every now and then I do it and this is one of those times because, frankly, I’m a little nervous.

Friday will be a new little music video.

Little Plastic Doll has written a love song. She calls it a ‘philosophical love song’ and she’s going to try it out on Rubber Lizard.

Little Plastic Doll has been feeling kind of Mary Shelley-ish, I think, ever since I mentioned Bram Stoker in that post I did on “The Lair of the White Worm.”

So she’s been, you know, nineteenth century, philosophizing and talking about God and all. Hmmm. The landed-gentry lady at leisure.

I’m a little nervous.

We’ll see. Tune in Friday. The post will be called,
“Hold Me Forever: A Doll Philosophy.”

















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