Today is my birthday and despite requests for a birthday cake picture, I decided to post this shot of some blackberries. I took this picture on Bainbridge Island by the water in Fort Ward State Park. There were blackberry bushes all along the waterfront and the berries were just starting to come through (as you can see).
I have a really nice lens that I take out with me that I used here (for the technical amongst you it’s a Nikon 70-200 f/2.8 VR II) and it can capture images with really nice bokeh. Bokeh is the creamy out of focus background you see in the image below and usually appears as circular highlights. What the lens really does is take a picture with a very narrow or shallow depth of field, this means only a small part of the subject I’m shooting is in focus and everything in front and behind is out of focus. It’s nice for taking pictures that concentrate on the subject without having distracting backgrounds – very big in portrait photography. As I take a lot of landscape pictures I don’t do this very often as for landscape you want everything in focus. Here it’s really great at capturing the blackberries.
When I got home and looked at the images my first reaction was, Oh no, there are cob webs all over the bush, but after a while I decided I actually liked that about the image, it gave it for me a rustic, wild look.
Anyway I hope you like my image.
So anyway, back to the birthday, what did I get? Well Lisa got me a fantastic color printer that prints out professional 17″ x 22″ photographs (again in case your interested it was an Epson Stylus Pro 3880). Over the coming weeks I’m planning on printing out and displaying some of my images around the house (and maybe at work too). I’m quite excited about this as creating really good prints is something I know little about.
The kids got me some great books on photographing locations around Washington State and Oregon. The books are brilliant and have some wonderful locations just a drive away. I actually wish I had these at the beginning of the year, but they will help me capture some really cool images for the rest of this year’s picture a day resolution.
I should point out that Lisa also made me a fantastic birthday card. She’s really into the craft thing and makes cards for everyone but mine was something she has never created before, a DSLR Camera. I think it’s brilliant and will be pinning it on my wall at work. (You can see the card below in the Halo picture).
Here we have Carter and Master Chief posing by my cool birthday card (of a camera) – made by Lisa, and a birthday balloon.
