A Rose is a Rose, is a Rose....

Ron and I decided to get creative today....so we stopped at Haggen's grocery store and bought a single rose. We then drove out to Washington Park in Anacortes (funny how we always end up in Anacortes !) We found a shaded area with lots of ferns and other greenery and set our red rose in the midst of everything. I wanted to focus only on the rose and blur the background out completely. The photo below was the result.

There are a couple of different ways to achieve the blurred background.......the first, being that you use the widest aperture on your lens. The above photo was taken with a Nikon 85 mm lens on the 1.4 aperture.....which is a VERY wide opening. This allows for a very shallow depth of field so the background can be blurred out. The photo below was taken with a F4 aperture.....it's amazing to see the difference in such a small difference.

The second way you can achieve a blurred background, is to use extension tubes. These are rings that you put inbetween your lens and the camera to allow you to get very close to your subject (as in macro photography), but this also allows you to get a greater blur to your backgrounds. I was using approximately 24mm worth of extension tubes. (They comes in various sizes.) Not all lenses will allow for the use of extension tubes. You need to be able to adjust your lenses manually, not electronically.....(however there are some new extension tubes that will connect electronically to the newer lenses.) The photos below were also taken using the Nikon 85mm at F1.4 and 24mm extension tubes.

When the weather doesn't cooperate, you just have to create your own scene to photograph. ( I was having a difficult time focusing because everything has to be done by hand.....no automatic focus with extension tubes. My camera does not have "live view" where you can zoom in on your subject, so my focus was a bit off on some of them.)

Our little adventure might not get anyone else excited, but it's something that Ron and I really enjoy doing together. Ron's photos turned out much better than mine....because his camera has "live view", and he uses Photoshop CS4 to convert them. I use Nikon Capture NX2, which is not as flexible. But it was still fun anyway. The photo below Ron took with a Nikon 200 Macro lens, using F4 with 25mm extension tubes.