Painting with the colors of light

A shallow depth of field created with a lens like the Canon 50mmf/1.4

or Canon 100mmf/2.8 gives me many creative ways of composing a

photograph. The background or so called 'negative space' is as important

to me as the sharply focused principal subject. The images obtain a

special 'painterly look' or 'bokeh' and printed on canvas they sometimes

appear to be painted and not photographed.

I apply this technique to almost all my close up and macro photography.

Nevertheless there are photographs which have this painterly feel in a

special way.

The term 'bokeh' originally comes from the japanese word boke

(暈け or ボケ), which means “blur” or “haze”, or boke-aji (ボケ味),

the “blur quality”. In photography bokeh is the blur, or the aesthetic

quality of the blur, in out-of-focus areas of an image, or “the way the

lens renders out-of-focus points of light.” Differences in lens aberrations

and aperture shape cause some lens designs to blur the images in

different ways.*

 * Sorce (on bokeh) Wikipedia