As you may or may not know I’ve recently started using a micro four thirds camera. One of the bonuses of using this system is that you can fit practically any lens to it. When I used Canon I lusted after their automatic 50mm 1.2 lens which costs about a grand…

But start looking at legacy lenses (old manual lenses) which you can use on a micro four thirds and you’re looking at a lot less – a 50mm at 1.8 and 1.4 can come in really cheap, although I bit the bullet and splashed out on a 50mm 1.2 which I found on eBay. Once you get an adapter, (you can get a cheapie on eBay) you’re up and away. There are a few little things to get the hang of; learning to take pictures more slowly as you manually focus, figuring out how to use focus peaking if your camera has this feature (so handy!) and so on. I’ll go into the all the geeky deets of my camera, function and lenses soon I promise!

I’ve been delving into some full-on micro four thirds photography blogs and loving it. One of the reasons I went for such a fast and wide aperture lens was to try and develop my bokeh photos – a Japanese word which means the quality of the blurriness in photos (or ‘crazy in the eye’ as somebody translated it). I love beautiful bokeh and love trying to take photos which achieve that dreamy background blur.

Which is why, today, I create a new tumblr blog for just this – Crazy Beautiful Bokeh. Here you’ll find my best bokeh shots as I take them. In case you’re wondering, I edit in Lightroom with the VSCO Cam film filters, which I apply with plugin The Fader. I then adjust contrast, brightness, white balance and exposure and resize in Photoshop.

Do you use any old manual lenses? How do you post-process?