Week 6: Bokeh

Mondays have usually been my posting days, but I didn't have time.  Matt's great grandpa passed away and his funeral was yesterday.  While I didn't really know him that well, he was a great man and he will be missed by many.   

• Side note on funerals: I hate them!  I know that many people view them as a way to find closure, to deal with grief, etc., and I respect that.  But personally I hate gathering around the casket (all dead people look a little creepy) then sitting in a church with everyone crying all around me singing somewhat depressing songs.  I would much prefer to have a party when I die.  I also hate the idea of being buried in the cold ground (I'm ALWAYS cold), so please, when I die, cremate me and have a big party with good music and good food to celebrate my life!  

• Side note on dying: Matt wondered yesterday if they celebrate your "death day" in the afterlife; we celebrate our "birthday" here, so why not?  Hmmmmm. . . .

Anyway on a lighter note, this week I was lacking inspiration in my photography, so I turned to the Digital Photography School's weekly challenge for inspiration.  These guys have a ton of great free articles and tutorials on their website, along with several ebooks (none of which I've ever bought, but they look good).  They send out a weekly newsletter, complete with a weekly assignment and photo challenge.  People post their pictures, can give and receive feedback, and there might be a prize for the winner, although I've never actually taken the time to post anything, so I could be wrong on that one.  This week's assignment was "Places of Worship", but that required going outside. . . .so I skipped out on that one.  Instead I took the photo challenge: Bokeh.

What is Bokeh, you may ask?  Yeah, I didn't know either.  Turns out it is "a Japanese term for the subjective aesthetic quality of out-of-focus areas of a photographic image."

(http://digital-photography-school.com/how-to-achieve-nice-bokeh-in-plain-english#ixzz2Kimyatrk)

And so I attempted (that being the key word there) to take some pictures that have nice bokeh.  I would not say that I was so successful, but hey, I learned something new.  My lenses have a max aperture of 3.5, and I feel like my photos would have been a lot better had I had a larger aperture.  Oh well.  Here are a few of the better ones though.

Also, the grandparents have told me over and over how much they love reading this blog.  But let's be honest, they don't care about photography, they just want to hear about Alex.  So here's the picture of Alex for the week.

Alex was thoroughly enjoying an orange strawberry smoothy at the time.  Once again, this would have been a much better picture if I could have blurred the background more, but oh well, he's cute!

Happy photographing!