Title • Jason #1

One of the things I stress when I'm teaching photography is that you should always consider the point-of-view from which you shoot, as an unusual angle or perspective can often make the difference between a mediocre shot and a great one. As such I had Jason spend quite a bit of time crawling around the beach looking for things to shoot during his recent one-to-one training. I can't quite remember what he was shooting at this point – it may have been a Pepsi can, a shot of which I'll blog next week – but, whatever it was, I thought I'd take a few pictures of him while he covered himself in sand.

As you can see though, if you take a look at the original, I didn't get it quite right: the depth of field was too large. This was a silly mistake – I should have been shooting at around f/2.8 – but grabbed the shot without giving it much thought.

Anyway, I took a look at this one not long after I got back from the UK and decided not to work on it: it was just too messy. A couple of days ago though I was looking at a Photoshop plugin review site. One of the featured plugins was Alien Skin's Bokeh. I'm not usually a big fan of plugins, especially those that simply replicate functionality that is already available in Photoshop, but Bokeh allows you to do something that's almost impossible to do in Photoshop alone: i.e. it allows you to decrease the apparent depth of field without introducing any obvious processing artefacts (most noticeably halos around the in-focus elements).

I'll post a more detailed review at some point, as I suspect that this is definitely a plugin I'll use again, but for the time being I'd definitely suggest downloading the demo version and trying it out for yourself.