How to pronounce "Bokeh" and what to do with it
What is bokeh? Firstly, it rhymes with Okay. Secondly it refers to the quality of the out of focus bits of a photo. So in this case it is how the out of focus points of light work. Basically bokeh is an excellent way of separating your figure from the background field. With the background out of focus it removes all distractions.
The standard outdoors technique is to go as wide as possible on the aperture. at f1.2 or f1.8 you get an extremely narrow depth of field. There's lots of variations all to do with the focal length, relative distance between figure and field and so on. Definitely worth playing with until you understand it intuitively.
Our lights were actually Christmas lights hanging from backdrop holder. We've since tried to construct a more permanent setup for the studio and I must admit we've never quite got the same effect again !
About the Experimental Shoots Blog Posts
In this series I am focussing on different kinds of setups I've tried. Some are more successful than others. The idea is tweak your creative juices. I'm going to give a few tips as we go, but not full details - I want your experiments to be your own - you will have different ideas, equipment, setups and so on.
I am always interested in the results, and if you want to post them to me I would be very happy to put them on the blog.
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