Please Come to Boston for the Springtime
Three more weeks of Digital Photography class have yielded two more photos to share.
Both of these pictures were experiments in depth of field. The unfortunate thing is that when you reduce the size of a photo, it totally flattens the depth of field, so that areas that were out of focus on the original look about the same as the in-focus areas. But trust me on this one: the originals look really cool.
The first image was taken at Mount Auburn Cemetery, where people like Harold Edgerton, B.F. Skinner, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow are buried. The spruce bough in the foreground is in sharp focus, while the tombstones in the background (with the shadows of the same boughs on them) are blurry.
The second shot was more serendipitous. We were shooting flowers in the Public Garden, and I wanted to shoot these two foot tall lily plants, but couldn’t take a side shot because the only backgrounds I could set them against were people or cars parked along a street. So I walked up and took a shot pointed straight down, and got a tremendous image. The leaves spiraling out from the central stem work great with the limited depth of field, which left the ground and the lower leaves a bit blurry.
I’m really pleased with how these two images came out, and look forward to playing around and building up a higher level of proficiency with controlling depth of field.