Bokeh garni - please comment

[TonyW]

In view of the discussion of bokeh in another thread I thought I would post three of pictures of mine. None of them is quite sharp enough and I would not have shown them here except to ask about the bokeh.

1. Female red-backed fairy wren. The bokeh here looks quite good to me. I was not able to get close enough to the bird to get a good detailed picture.

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056A5407Fairy-wren by tonyw36, on Flickr

2. Dianella with fly. Here the background is perhaps not the most attractive colour but that that's what was there and it is reasonable to my eye. I am still having trouble getting good sharpness with my macros but it was pretty small.

056A5575 by tonyw36, on Flickr

3. Rainbow bee-eater. Again not close enough. The bokeh looks reasonable to me but I am not sure whether there would be agreement about the blue sky showing through. Is that too much of a distraction and should I try to clone it out?

056A5422ed1 by tonyw36, on Flickr

[FootLoose]

Hi Tony, I think the bokeh in the first one is really good, and I would be quite happy with the other two. The exif has been stripped from these files, so could you tell me which lens(es) were used, please?

[Mike Buckley]

You can't control the quality of the bokeh; that is controlled by the engineers that designed the lens you are using. You can only control the content of the background and the extent to which it is blurred. Blur and bokeh are not the same.

I like the background in all three photos though the second could be improved for me if you toned down the distracting brightness in the top right area of the frame.

[TonyW]

Greg and Mike, thanks for your comments.

Hi Tony, I think the bokeh in the first one is really good, and I would be quite happy with the other two. The exif has been stripped from these files, so could you tell me which lens(es) were used, please?

For the birds I used an EF70-200f2.8L IS II lens with a 2x III extender. For no 1, focal length was 400, f8, SS 1/4000. For number 3, focal length was 360 (oops), f8, SS 1/3200. The aperture of f8 is after the correction for the extender.

For no 2, lens was EF100f2.8L Macro IS, f11, SS 1/125.

The camera is a Canon 5d3. ISO 2000 for all. I don't know where the EXIF data gets lost. It would be nice to keep it.

[Wavelength]

I liked them all very much; i never had seen a lilac tomato
i would also recommend a close trim in first and third for prominence of the main characters
Regards

[Stagecoach]

Tony,

I do not see a concern with any of the backgrounds. What does intrigue me is why you are concerned?

For each of these images, moving wildlife, the priority would be to get the subject to reasonably fill the frame as you require and get adequate DoF of the subject as you require. The blur and Bokeh will then be a product of how you achieved this with the lens and settings you used at the time.

Grahame

[jcuknz]

One thing to remember when editing is that if you make a selection the tool only works within the selected area. My PSPx6 makes this very easy for me and I am glad I invested in 'another' version [ have accumulated four of the five I have had as I updated now and again] since it has an 'intelligent selection tool' which saves the tedious going around an object of earlier versions and maybe using layer masks. Anyway here I just selected the little birdie and applied a bit of sharpening without affecting the background blurr .....

I am not an expert on blurr but all three look AOK to me. It is hardly there but I find out of focus highlights can be very distracting so I toned down the one area left after I cropped buirdie #2 after also sharpening just it.

[TonyW]

Thanks again for the replies.

The reason that I did not crop the birds closer is simply that I thought they did not have enough resolution as I was not close enough to them when I took the picture. These closer crops look OK at this size but I think would not stand any enlargement. I had sharpened the bee-eater as much as I thought I could get away with. This latest one does show some halo effect which is what limited me.

I have been struggling to understand what makes a good quality background, and to understand what people are talking about when they discuss bokeh. That's what prompted me to post these images and get some discussion. It does seem that when you can avoid highlighted spots or areas that the problems are not serious. The blue areas in the original picture of the bee-eater did not worry me because they seemed natural, did not have sharp boundaries and were far enough away from the bird but this is obviously a very subjective view.

Nandakumah, these blue berries are listed in some places as being edible but are said by others to be dangerous to the liver. I might taste one and then report on it if I survive. They are very small, about 1 cm in diameter, and not really comparable to a tomato although I must admit our cherry tomatoes are quite small too (and also quite tasty). I am not sure what the fly is but I thought for a while that it was a large mosquito.