Bokeh-dokie

"Bokeh" is the Japanese of "Blur" they said and the first time I heard it was in our Photography class, basically it's an image with a background that is blurred enough that little spots of light would form a shape, the default shape of this blur effect would be circles, but you can get creative with the shape by using a filter. You can make the said filter with a piece of paper and pair of scissors, but its recommendable if you use a black thick paper, a pair of scissors for cutting the cardboard and an X-Acto knife like tool to cut out the shape.

To make the Bokeh filter, you have to cut a piece of the paper small enough to fit in front of your lens. Then cut out a small shape, any desired shape, be it a triangle, a tear drop or even a word, as long as you can do it, cut out from the circular paper, the shape should at least be in sizes one inch and below and in the center of the paper.

Once you have the filter in front of your lens, you got to have a wide Aperture and a fast Shutter Speed, or a small Aperture and a slow Shutter Speed. You can either have a subject or not just as long it can be blurry enough with a manual focus and there're spots or dots of light on the parts that you want to be Bokeh'd.

Some examples which I used with filter with a cut out of a tear drop and an irregularly shaped star that ended up looking like a maple leaf:

Stage Two

Second semester is here and we continue our Photography lessons with our Concept and Creative Photography class, with the same professor, Sir Rey Mendoza. As an introductory we were asked three questions:

1. What have we learned from Basic Photography class
2. What can be improved on ourselves
3. What are our suggestions and expectations

Quoting from my previous blog post:

"I remember on the first day we were asked about why we want to learn Photography, and I answered: "Even though I already have experience how to use an SLR, the settings like Aperture, ISO and Shutter Speed and some others aren't really cleared up for me, I wanted to know what they are for. ", and after months of attending classes, my goal has been achieved and my questions has been answered, I learned a lot more than just the settings but also how to adjust it according situations."

After all that I've learned and experienced, I know I'm still not fit to go all out with Photography, I still have many things to learn in terms of situational and on the spot set up. I'm not fond of doing coverages for events within the campus because I'm not confident enough nor motivated enough to do so.

Since we usually do our shooting activities within the vicinity of the university, most of us students suggested for an outside activity.

We have four hours of class every Monday afternoon and our first topic was about Camera Raw files. Camera Raw files when compared to JPEG is that it has a larger file size, not ready for printing, contains the data of the shot that can be adjusted and reverted back to the original.

Camera Raw files can't be opened by built in image viewers, you still have to open them with another software, I usually use Photoshop to open it and it pops up a "Camera Raw" window which shows the image and its settings that can be adjusted.