I like this one the best, the reason for it:
The other two are messy arrangements ,don?t no where to look for.
Due of the Shallow DOF you don't notice it over here in this picture.
The one flower stand of very nice from the others as also from the background.
The red wheel would have done very good in this picture just for adding more colour in to the background I think, even as it has a small DOF it would look nice I guess.


Best regards,

Fons van Swaal. wrote:
> I like this one the best, the reason for it:
> The other two are messy arrangements ,don?t no where to look for.
> Due of the Shallow DOF you don't notice it over here in this picture.
> The one flower stand of very nice from the others as also from the background.
> The red wheel would have done very good in this picture just for adding more colour in to
> the background I think, even as it has a small DOF it would look nice I guess.
>
>
> Best regards,
>

Thanks Fons,

Those were mostly experimental shots at home. I like to occasionally experiment on home plants, so I take better pictures once I get out there and see something that I really like.

My primary goal on these images was to blur the background (as much as I can) and yet leave all the flower petals in good crispy focus. Of cource I can spend 30 seconds fixing it in PS, but I wanted to try it right out of the camera - and I find this to be a rather discouraging assignment with Olympus camera due to the small sensor. You have to always chose between blurry background and/or good focus on the main subject.

I have a friend in Slovakia (we used to work together on one of the projects here in Vienna); an avid photographer and nature lover; so he once explained to me that the DOF with smaller and larger sensor can remain pretty much the same, but it is focal plane that gets different amounts of magnification and that what effectively results in blurry backgrounds. As in this example (most of the images were taken some few years ago - you can peruse his galleries);

http://galleries.harustak.sk/displayimage.php?album=lastup&cat=0&pos=4

As you see the flower remains in good (or rather excellent) focus, and yet the background is hardly recognizable. The focal plane magnification, in other words, does not remain linear but gets rather exponential and the larger sensor (he uses D70) will always do a better job (subject in focus and background is blurry) than the smaller one.

Here was once another article that touched on this subject (Comparing E1 to 1D);

http://www.neurologenpraxis.de/Oly/OLYCanonE.html

As you see the plants do not necessarily get more out of focus (noticeably at least) on the images taken with both cameras, but what is behind that does.

As for the flower with the red wheel;

http://myolympus.org/document.php?id=6224

this was yet another (fooling around) experiment. I put the plant in front of the computer monitor and took number if images (of the same flower) with different backgrounds. Some I thought were kind of cute. I wonder if Richard Ociepka (once shown a few versions of it) would call it "cheating" if I entered it for one of the Yahoo contests. :) Huh, like I would tell them!

You can see the images at;

http://ph.groups.yahoo.com/group/MyOlympus/photos/browse/25d5?b=1&m=t

Which one do you like the best? ;)

Thanks for your comments, Fons,

-