This time around - with my large audience of a single follower :) - I wanna share the importance of background in (especially outdoor) portrait shots. Here's one I like:
The halos in the background are called 'bokeh'. Apparently boke in Japanese means blur. And 'boke-aji' is the blur (or de-focusing) quality. I'm sure you can reach more precise and detailed knowledge-base about the origin of the word on the net. The contrast of focused and de-focused areas on the picture make it more striking.
In this second example, there is no bokeh, but the background, again, is all washed out. This is best done with zoom lenses, as their focal threshold is shorter and when wide aperture is chosen, then background becomes a soup of colors.
A couple of important points need to be watched:
1) If you're using, let's say a 70-200mm f/2.8 lens and operate at 2.8, in order to get the best of the background blur, then you may also get some de-focused areas on the face of the subject. So be careful about what exactly you want to focus to. You don't wanna miss the eyes.
2) Keep your subject further away from the background. However, you also need to be careful with too much distance, because then you start losing light reaching your camera from the background, which would make it dark and dull.
In the third photograph, there are again focused and de-focused areas, but this time it's not in the form of background versus foreground. This time there are two different focus areas, which makes one go around in the frame.
I hope my large and uncontrollable audience is going to have a healthy, happy, wealthy, peaceful New Year with full of laughter.
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