Bottles and Bokeh

The other morning, I got up early and went to Dupont Circle. I guess there must have been some party going on there the night before. By and around the fountain area there were several empty bottles of wine. Given the lighting conditions, it was an opportunity to take some wide open bokeh shots with my 50mm 1.8 AF-D. For those who are not familiar with photography, bokeh is the out of focus blur in a photograph. It comes from a Japanese term which means blur. The quality of bokeh depends on the lens. The 50mm 1.8 AF-D is not known for producing the highest quality of bokeh. Still for such a cheap lens, I am not going to complain about the bokeh. The new 50mm 1.8 AF-S G is supposed to be a little better though.



The last two were taken with my 24mm f/2 wide open. The lens is a little too soft wide open. I find it more fun to shot close up with it, that is if I shot it at f2. When focusing close up with a fast wide angle lens, the distortion of the lens produces an a curvature in the angle of view.



You can use such distortion close to make the image more creative. This image below wouldn't have been as interesting IMHO I had taken it with my distortion free 50mm 1.8.

Slutwalk DC

Last Saturday, just for fun, I went downtown at Lafayette Square to shoot a "Slutwalk" march. To shot this event, I chose two of my primes lenses, the old 24mm f/2.0 AIS and my 50mm f/1.8 AF-D. I tend to like primes for their small size (although Nikon's latest primes have grown in size). Being an old AIS lens, the 24mm takes a little more effort to use on my D50 as I had to manually focus and meter the exposure for my shots. Nevertheless, I enjoyed using the lens for this event because of its smaller size compared to my wide angle zoom.

Slutwalk DC, a set on Flickr.

Fireworks - Ain't that America

I am late to post these, but here are some photos of the fireworks from the July 4th.