photo friday: christmas tree

christmas balls 2006christmas lights 2006christmas blur 2006Another triple set for today's Photo Friday...

These are, rather unsurprisingly, from last Sunday's Adventures in Tree Trimming... one regular, one light trails, one blurred...

Of the three, the light trails were the easiest (thank you fireworks setting) and the blurred ones were the hardest to do... since I couldn't work out how to stop the autofocus autofocussing, I ended up having to focus on something close up (alternately my hand and the instructions booklet for a evaporative cooler), hold the shutter so the focus stayed, then take the shot of the tree... but I actually quite like the results... big hat tip to Andrew for the original idea...

And that should pretty much complete "Christmas Theme Week" here at yaniblog... although I'm not promising anything...

Current Mood:

5 comments:

Tom said...

More giraffy things, although clearly a tripod this time. You're still hiding around the corner. Boo!

I like the fireworks one the best I think!

Just out of interest... what's the protocol in photography circles for using software - it was interesting that you said you struggled to override the autofocus on the bottom one. You could have taken a sharp one and then blurred it in photoshop or something - or is that considered cheating?

yani said...

You know, I had to go experiment before I could answer this one...

As far as photography circles and Photoshop goes, it depends on the circles... my Camera Club was fine with going to town with Photoshop, but I know there were other clubs that frowned on it for whatever reason.

And as for blurring the image in photoshop, there's actually a world of difference between taking a shot that's out of focus and the effect that you get out of Photoshop... particularly in this case...

"The blur filters soften a selection or an image, and are useful for retouching. They smooth transitions by averaging the pixels next to the hard edges of defined lines and shaded areas in an image."

In other words, instead of the points of colour and light, I would have ended up with a big dark blur (I know, because I tried it). I'm sure it's all to do with lenses and suchlike... but for the record, no, I couldn't have gotten the same effect in Photoshop... :)

S said...

Pretty nice balls.

yani said...

Interestingly enough, that's the second time I've been told that in the past 72 hours :P

The Other Andrew said...

Thanks for the props! I'm shooting with a Canon 350D DSLR, and the lens has a button to flick it to manual focus. Then it's a quick twist of the wrist (dirty) and viola out-of-focus. Intentionally, for a change!