‘Tis the season to be jolly and with mulled wine and spirits on the menu, staying in sharp focus is hard to do. Moreover, low light comes on much earlier now it’s winter which means the camera needs to up its speed and increase aperture in order to cope. Otherwise, blurry, grainy images ensue …
But I like the effects of blur and so use it intentionally too, especially when it comes to this time of year . De-focusing also gives people greater anonymity (and me less guilt at intrusiveness) as they move into frame.
Blurs, be they abstract, impressionist, or realistic, can be great fun to play with. For me, it’s a fallback technique when I need to jumpstart my creativity.
David Shaw
The amount of blur we give our photos is a matter of taste – I like to push the boundaries.
“bokeh” is Japanese in origin, and it’s used to describe blur, especially blur that has a great beauty. …those lovely orbs of blurry light that will appear whenever you use a large aperture to shoot a scene that has a lot of areas of bright light in the background.
David Peterson
Bokeh is hard to get right as it can glare the background – other times it becomes completely abstract and is archetypical of Christmas lights photos.
And finally, for those of us who like to take photos a step further into photoart edits, blur is already halfway to impressionistic images and Christmas card illustrations.
PoetryPix 