A Little Picture Experiment

If you remember last weeks Dandelion post, you will recognize the project that these pictures come from.  I wanted to write about what I was trying to do with these pictures, what seemed to work and what seemed not to work.  I also want to give a little shout out to a fellow blogger, Rhyming Red, who wrote a poem inspired by the Dandelion post.  Check it out by clicking on Rhyming Red.

First, if you follow my blog you know that I like focused foreground/blurry background shots.  I think they are fun to look at, and I really like taking them and thinking of different ways that I can take them.  I saw a picture once with someone blowing something out of their hands, and that is how this whole idea came to be.  I thought it would be fun to try and blow on a dandelion in its white fluffy stage and focus on the little dandelion seeds that blow away.  It wasn’t as easy as I anticipated.  First I had my husband try after I explained what I was looking for.  This is what some of the first shots looked like.

 We used a 50mm f1.8 lens, and these pictures were taken at f1.8.  The first thing we tried was focusing right on the dandelion, and my idea was that if you blew the stuff forward it would automatically catch it in the focus because I thought we had focused on the right spot.  If you look at the pictures you can see that when I blew on the dandelion, it didn’t push it forward, you can see (really blurry) that the fluff floated off to the side, and definitely didn’t get focused on at all.  In our next attempt we tried having me just hold the dandelion lower.  That didn’t work either.  My husband suggested that maybe it had to do with having the auto focus on when we took the picture.  He tried focusing with auto focus, then turning it on manual focus so that it was already focused the right way.  The picture below on the right is the finished product.  It was the closest to what I had been thinking of that we were able to get.

I tried to take some shots of him also using the same techniques as he used.  I did not have as much success as he ended up having with the dandelion shot he got of me.  This skill is still a work in progress.

We did try it with something bigger that we could just blow from our hands and that turned out fun.  Focusing on one point worked for these pictures pretty well.  I think it was because there were more objects to focus on.

If you are reading this and have any suggestions on how to make this type of picture work, or if you would like to share your experience taking similar pictures, I would love to hear about it.  This is my first time really posting a how to/my experience kind of post, so feed back would be great.  I hope I can do more posts sharing about things I learn or that could help others learn.