Over the weekend, I was taking some time to review some new hardware (not done testing yet, so gotta wait there) and I was testing in various types of lighting conditions, and at various burst rates. During the course of the testing, I remembered how beautiful the bokeh is on the Sigma 70mm Macro lens.
Rather than diving into some lengthy narrative about what bokeh is, and how bokeh can really set things off nicely in an image, I figured it might be easier this time to just demonstrate with a few shots with what I would call…
Beautiful Bokeh
The background is simply the tree branches against the sky as the sun set to my left…it gave a nice touch (sunset colors always do, even if you can’t see them), so I decided to try a few other colors against the backdrop. It’s pretty interesting to see how other colors fared with the background…check out the rest of these:
I don’t know why, but for some reason, this one is my favorite – simple, detailed, a little underexposed, but the underexposure brings out a tonality that is just really appealing to me. And of course, I stayed at f2.8 to keep the bokeh the same!
The Orange Juice had a really cool and distinct look to it with the green backdrop and the brown ledge of our deck. I also thought this one came out nicely.
The bottled water I liked, but am not crazy about the reflections you can see in the water itself. I was thinking the bokeh from the background would be upside down in the water, but instead I caught some of the house behind me. Thankfully, because the dof was so shallow, it’s blurred and not as distinct. Still, something I’d change if I had it to do over again…
Just had to throw one in here of the dog – she is such a trooper! Poor thing was bitten unexpectedly while on our evening walk last sunday and has been dealing with the abcess and after-effects for the last week now. The anti-biotics are yummy because we give them to her with peanut butter, but for for the most part, you can tell she’s just not comfortable. This shot kind of typified her emotions of the past week, and the bokeh in the background fit the theme, so, as I said, just had to keep this one in.
It’s fun testing new hardware because it always keep me active with my own gear (and I can draw comparisons that way), and I get to tweak my own style as well. The Sigma 70mm Macro is definitely one I plan on keeping in my bag for a long time, because the bokeh and sharpness are among my favorites.
Which lens produces your favorite bokeh? Is it a macro? A zoom? Something else? What about your vendor preference? I’ve heard different vendors shape the blades of their apertures differently and the resulting bokeh can be quite markedly different. Share your own favorites and thoughts in the comments! Have a great day and we’ll see you back here tomorrow! Happy shooting… 🙂
P.S. Oh yeah, also wanted to throw out a reminder about the May giveaway which is going on right now. The theme is Wide and the prize this month is a copy of PTGui Pano Software – this is really incredible software at stitching multiple shots together to form panorama photos, both landscape and portrait style! The Flickr thread is here.
P.P.S. A reader also pointed out to me that I forgot to include a link to the latest podcast, which went live last week, so for those of you that wait for announcements here to download the podcast, #45 is up and ready for download at your convenience. Enjoy!
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