The Top 5 Reasons To Blur Your Images

Technique - Blurring  Comment
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View more of Arduina Caponigro’s images here.

One of the best things about photography is that it records so much detail; one of the worst things about photography is that it records so much detail. The question becomes, “Is all of the detail in the frame significant?” and “Are the qualities of the information presented appropriate for the statement being made?” Photographers are obsessed with making sharp images and for good reason, if the main subject is out-of-focus it usually frustrates viewers – with a few notable exceptions. Sharp focus is often mistaken for good technique, when in fact it’s just a technique, sometimes better and sometimes worse. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Too much sharp information may become overstimulating. Overly sharp images grate on nerves, especially if digital sharpening artifacts draw attention to themselves and away from more important aspects of an image. So, it’s equally important to understand when to use blur, how much, what kind but most importantly why.

Here are five key reasons to use blur in images.

Focus Attention

You can make focussed areas seem even more focussed and important bey reducing the focus of other areas, a little or a lot. This is a classic move used frequently by portrait and street photographers when trying to emphasize people and reduce or even eliminate distracting background elements.

Accentuate Space

It’s not only focus but also its relationship to blur that gives us clues to depth-of-field or how deep a space we’re looking at. Increase the difference between the two and space within the frame is enhanced.

Enhance Mood

Texture has inherent aesthetic qualities like sharpness and softness that can greatly enhance an image’s mood. Just ask, how do you want an image to feel physically and emotionally?

Show motion

While photographs are by their nature still, life is constantly in motion, and you may want to record that. While the artifacts cameras produce aren’t the same as our bodies visual experience of motion they provide a range of visual codes that can suggest motion and can even be fascinating visual experiences in and of themselves, at times providing us new windows into the world, whether it’s the subject or the camera that moves.

Create Abstractions

By deemphasizing details you can direct more attention to the foundations of images. Go further and you can produce simplifications that are virtually unrecognizable and become new aesthetic experiences.

Detail is an essential element in every image but there’s a wide range of ways to treat it and reasons to do so. If you’re not sure what you prefer, explore many ways before committing to a solution that feels right to you. As you find that you’re called towards certain treatments ask why and how that’s serving the statements you’re making with your images. You may become more conscious of what you’ve found your way to unconsciously and in so doing discover more about how your style reveals your vision and aspects of yourself. 

Don’t forget to explore your digital options. There’s a wealth of new exposure combinations and digital post-processing techniques that may serve you well. If you find you prefer analog processes and effects, ask yourself why. Your answer may be significant even revealing to you and your audiences. What you choose not to do can be just as revealing as what you do. Just make it intentional.

Read more about Blur.
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Why Defocussing Your Images Will Help You See Them Better

Creativity - Exercises  Comment
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It’s easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees.

We’re capable of seeing a lot of detail. Sometimes detail is distracting. Eliminating it can help us see fundamentals more clearly.

1     Frame an image.
2     Defocus your lens enough to lose sight of details.
3     Refine your composition by moving the camera or zooming.
4     Refocus.
5     Expose.

You can also do this with existing exposures to better see distracting elements that can be made less distracting or removed altogether.

Images that contain well-rendered detail without a solid compositional structure often appear cluttered and confusing. Develop the habit of slowing down and taking the time to make sure your compositions are as strong as they can be.

Find more resources on Composition here.
Learn more in my digital photography workshops.

Creative Mindfulness Practices

Creativity - Mindfulness, Meditation  Comment
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A mindfulness practice will boost your creativity, awareness, focus, and enjoyment.

You can be as creative with it as you are with your art.

 

1. 7 Great Great Resources For Developing Your Creative Mindfulness Practice (01/21) |Free
The plans you make are there to further your progress.

2. What Is Meditation (08/12) | Free 
How do I find inspiration?

3. Meditation Can Be / Doesn’t Have To Be A Religious Experience (08/12) | Free
Meditation isn’t a religious practice.

4. All Religions Practice Forms Of Meditation (08/12) | Free
Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all practice forms of meditation.

5. Benefits of Meditating (9/12) | Free
You will create many benefits for yourself by meditating.

6. The Physical Benefits of Meditating (9/12) | Free
There are many clinically proven physical benefits of practicing meditation.

7. Increase Your Awareness Of Your Body Through Meditation (10/12) | Free
For much of our daily lives we are unconscius of our bodies.

8. How Many Thoughts A Day Do You Think? (11/12) | Free
On average, we each think 60,000 thoughts a day.

9. How Long Should I Meditate? (12/12) | Free
The question will serve you much better if you consider it over time.

10. How To Find Time For Meditation? (12/12) | Free
You can find time for meditation without changing your schedule.

11. Increase Your Awareness Of Your Environment Through Meditation? (12/12) | Free
Spend some time becoming more aware of the miracles that surrounds you.

12. Increase Your Awareness Of Your Mind Through Meditation. (12/12) | Free
Consciousness is one of the great riddles of the universe for which there are few answers.

13. Increase Your Awareness Of Your Emotions Through Meditation.. (1/13) | Free
For most of us, when it comes to emotions, our thinking is often unclear.

 

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Extend Depth of Field With Focus Stacking

Technique - MultiShot  Comment
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2_back2

Foreground in focus

1_front

Background in focus

3_infiniteDOF

Two exposures combined to achieve infinite depth of field

How deep would you like your depth of field to be? The choice is yours. Today, there are virtually no limits. You can extend depth of field beyond the physical limitations of any lens/camera system with multi-shot exposure practices and software – by compositing multiple exposures.

To do this you first need to make a set of focus bracketed exposures, optimizing focus in different image areas. How many exposures you’ll need will depend on how much depth of field a scene contains. At a minimum, make two exposures; one focused on the foreground and another focused on the background. Making three exposures is better; one each for foreground, middle ground and background. When dealing with extreme depth of field, like macro or microphotography, you’ll want to make more exposures, at least three, probably six, possibly more. When in doubt, make more exposures than you think you’ll need; you don’t have to use them all when you stack the separate exposures, but they’ll be there if you need them. Unlike bracketing for HDR, it’s almost impossible to automate these types of bracketing sequences in camera as focus needs to be adjusted for each frame. However, for tethered shooting, you can use software such as Helicon Remote to take control of your camera and automate this process and other bracketed sequences like HDR and time-lapse. Whenever possible use a tripod to make focusing during exposure more precise and registration during post-processing easier. While using a tripod always delivers more reliable results, don’t let this stop you from trying this technique hand-held, especially with simpler sequences, like those used in landscape. You may notice that In cases involving extreme depth of field, you may notice the relative size of objects may change between individual exposures. These effects will be automatically adjusted during the merging process.

Before you combine a set of focus bracketed exposures, make all the Raw conversion adjustments you’d like to make to the final file. It’s quick and easy to process a focus bracketed series of files; process one file in the series ideally and then Sync the other files to it. Once a Raw file is rendered, you can’t re-access the data in it, such as ‘recovering’ highlights or ‘filling’ shadows, without re-rendering it. While, you can adjust lens distortions after stacking with Photoshop’s filter Lens Corrections, it’s much easier, faster and more robust to apply Lens Corrections during raw conversion, before focus stacking 16-bit TIFFs.

Once you have a processed set of focus bracketed exposures you can automate the process of stacking and blending them into a single file in Photoshop. (Unlike HDR and Panorama merges, you can’t make a focus stacked merge in Lightroom – currently.)

6_AutoBlend

Photoshop’s Auto-Blend Layers dialog

7_FocusStackLayers

Photoshop’s auto-masked layer stack

Take these four steps.

1          Using Adobe Bridge highlight all of the files you’d like to combine.
2          Go to Tools > Photoshop > Load Files Into Photoshop Layers
3          In Photoshop’s Layers palette highlight the layers
4          Go To Edit > Auto-Blend Layers, check Stack Images and click OK

You can then further refine these results, including manually adjusting the automated masks or distorting layers, but this is rarely necessary. Photoshop does a fine job for a majority of applications.
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8_HFmain

Helicon Focus’ main window

9_HFAutoadjustment

Helicon Focus’ Autoadjustment panel

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36 Great Quotes On Concentration

Creativity - Quotes  Comment
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Quotes_Concentration
Enjoy this collection of quotes on Concentration.
“The power to concentrate was the most important thing. Living without this power would be like opening one’s eyes without seeing anything.” ― Haruki Murakami
“Concentration is the secret of strength.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Concentrated attention is the collection of units of power on a chosen point of intention.” – James Arthur Ray
“If you don’t concentrate on what you are doing then the thing that you are doing is not what you are thinking.” – Alfred, Lord Tennyson
“Don’t dissipate your powers; strive to concentrate them.” – Goethe
“One reason so few of us achieve what we truly want is that we never direct our focus; we never concentrate our power. Most people dabble their way through life, never deciding to master anything in particular.” – Anthony Robbins
“Each man is capable of doing one thing well. If he attempts several, he will fail to achieve distinction in any.” – Plato
“The difference in men does not lie in the size of their hands, nor in the perfection of their bodies, but in this one sublime ability of concentration: to throw the weight in one blow, to live eternity in an hour.” – Elbert Hubbard
“The five essential entrepreneurial skills for success are concentration, discrimination, organization, innovation and communication. -Michael Faraday
“Concentration is my motto — first honesty, then industry, then concentration. -Andrew Carnegie
“The ability to concentrate and to use time well is everything.” – Lee Iacocca
“Singleness of purpose is one of the chief essentials for success in life, no matter what may be one’s aim.” – John D. Rockefeller
“The joy of life is born of concentration. When you are having a cup of tea, the value of that experience depends on your concentration. You have to drink the tea with 100 percent of your concentration.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
“To be concentrated means to live fully in the present.” – Erich Fromm
“Concentration is the ability to think about absolutely nothing when it is absolutely necessary.” – Ray Knight
“Intelligence is the door to freedom and alert attention is the mother of intelligence.” – Jon Kabat-Zinn
“Concentrate on your motivation… and the thought of what about the scene made you stop to look.” – Richard K. Kaiser
“The artist works with a concentration of his whole personality, and the conscious part of it resolves conflicts, organized memories, and prevents him from trying to walk in two directions at the same time.” – Henry Moore
To be able to concentrate for a considerable time is essential to difficult achievement.” -Bertrand Russell
“I never could have done what I have done without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one subject at a time…” – Charles Dickens
“Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.” – Alexander Graham Bell
“The only way I could work properly was by using the absolute maximum of observation and concentration that I could possible muster.” – Lucian Freud
“Concentration comes out of a combination of confidence and hunger.” – Arnold Palmer
“The more intensely we feel about an idea or a goal, the more assuredly the idea, buried deep in our subconscious, will direct us along the path to its fulfilment.” – Earl Nightingale
“Great art is always a way of concentrating, reinventing what is called fact, what we know of our existence – a reconcentration… tearing away the veils that fact acquires through time.” – Francis Bacon
“Who knows how many artists fail because the light that shines through them is defracted in a thousand directions and not concentrated in a single beam?” – Eric Maisel
“Nothing more wonderfully concentrates a man’s mind than the sure knowledge he is to be hanged in the morning.” – Samuel Johnson
“Concentrate: you can’t have it all.” – Twyla Tharp
“Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have twenty-four hour days.” – Zig Ziglar
“Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.” –
Henry Ford
“Focus more on your desire than on your doubt, and the dream will take care of itself.” – Mark Twain
“I don’t focus on what I’m up against. I focus on my goals and I try to ignore the rest.” – Venus Williams
“Concentration is a fine antidote to anxiety.” Jack Nicklaus
Focusing is about saying “No”. – Steve Jobs
“Without touching my subject I want to come to the moment when, through pure concentration of seeing, the composed picture becomes more made than taken. Without a descriptive caption to justify its existence, it will speak for itself – less descriptive, more creative; less informative, more suggestive – less prose, more poetry.” – Ernst Haas
“Elegance is achieved when all that is superfluous has been discarded and the human being discovers simplicity and concentration: the simpler and more sober the posture, the more beautiful it will be.” – Paulo Coelho
Explore The Essential Collection Of Creativity Quotes here.
View The Essential Collection Of Creativity Videos here.
Discover more quotes in my social networks.

54 Great Quotes On Focus

Creativity - Quotes  Comment
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Quotes_Focus
Enjoy this collection of quotes on Focus.
“If you chase two rabbits, both will escape” — Anonymous
“That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” – Steve Jobs
“Focusing is about saying No.” ― Steve Jobs
“My success, part of it certainly, is that I have focused in on a few things.” — Bill Gates
“Most of what we say and do is not essential. If you can eliminate it, you’ll have more time, and more tranquillity. Ask yourself at every moment, ‘Is this necessary?’” — Marcus Aurelius
“A person who is gifted sees the essential point and leaves the rest as surplus.” – Thomas Carlyle
“If you don’t pay appropriate attention to what has your attention, it will take more of your attention than it deserves.” – David Allen
“One way to boost our will power and focus is to manage our distractions instead of letting them manage us.” – Daniel Goleman
“Avoid fragmentation: Find your focus and seek simplicity. Purposeful living calls for elegant efficiency and economy of effort—expending the minimum time and energy necessary to achieve desired goals.” – Dan Millman
“Do whatever you do intensely.” — Robert Henri
“To create something exceptional, your mindset must be relentlessly focused on the smallest detail.” — Giorgio Armani
“If you just focus on the smallest details, you never get the big picture right.” – Leroy Hood
“When you are completely caught up in something, you become oblivious to things around you, or to the passage of time. It is this absorption in what you are doing that frees your unconscious and releases your creative imagination.” – Rollo May
“For a person to become deeply involved in any activity it is essential that he knows precisely what tasks he must accomplish, moment by moment.” — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
“The more a person feels skilled, the more her moods will improve; while the more challenges that are present, the more her attention will become focused and concentrated.” — Mihaly Csikszentmihaly
“Life is a train of moods like a string of beads; and as we pass through them they prove to be many colored lenses, which paint the world their own hue, and each shows us only what lies in its own focus.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.” – Mark Twain
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13 Quotes On Focus

Creativity - Quotes  Comment
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Find out more about this image here.
Here’s a collection of my favorite quotes on focus.
“A person who aims at nothing is sure to hit it.” — Anonymous
“One reason so few of us achieve what we truly want is that we never direct our focus; we never concentrate our power. Most people dabble their way through life, never deciding to master anything in particular.” — Tony Robbins
“Focus is a matter of deciding what things you’re not going to do.” — John Carmack
“Discovering what you really want saves you endless confusion and wasted energy.” — Stuart Wilde
“But when you’re beginning, you should try to focus on something you love and your own way of doing things.” — Jerry Harrison
“A clear vision, backed by definite plans, gives you a tremendous feeling of confidence and personal power.” — Brian Tracy
“Concentration can be cultivated. One can learn to exercise will power, discipline one’s body and train one’s mind.” — Anil Ambani
“The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus.” — Bruce Lee
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Extend Depth Of Field With Focus Stacking

Magazine - Digital Photo Pro, Technique - Exposure  Comment
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How deep would you like your depth of field? The choice is yours. Today, there are virtually no limits. You can extend depth of field beyond the physical limitations of any lens/camera system with multishot exposure practices and software that composites multiple exposures.


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