Apologies for the radio silence this week! All the recent travel has left me precariously behind on the old content creation… So many lovely things to share but in the meantime a little Instagram hashtag project, I hope you’ll join in!

One of the main reasons I got so obsessively into photography (my first camera was a second-hand DSLR from eBay which I bought about a year before starting my blog) was bokeh. Chasing the beautiful out-of-focus blur in a photo and learning to appreciate the quality of it. Once I’d got beyond the basics of learning composition and how to take an ok-looking picture, more than anything I wanted to get that beautiful blur. 

bokeh

ˈbəʊkeɪ/

noun

the visual quality of the out-of-focus areas of a photographic image, especially as rendered by a particular lens.

My first step towards that was getting into prime lenses and using a wide aperture. Of course, this isn’t the only way to achieve bokeh, the real art is your technique – in a nutshell, get close to your subject and leave lots of space behind – but it’s easy to get a little obsessive about wide aperture lenses as they do help you achieve beautiful bokeh more easily. 

Along my journey, I even had the most wonderfully poignant online conversation with a Japanese photographer about it. “Does shallow depth of field and a wide aperture produce good bokeh?” I asked him. “That is a tender question,” he replied. I even dedicated a tumblr blog (now much neglected I’m ashamed to say) in honour of our exchange. 

In an effort to reignite and recognise what it is continues to fuel daily my love for photography I thought I’d try to start a hashtag project. No idea how these things really work or take off or if there are enough people out there with the same interest in my circles, but hey, nothing to lose, right? Just another slimly populated hashtag out there in the digital world… But if you’d like to take part, please do.

Tag your photos, new and old #mybeautifulbokeh and let’s see what blurred beauty we can bring together… My first picture is handpicked lavender and wildflowers on a wooden bowl. Taken with a 75mm lens at 1.8 aperture, I love how the background stems and buds are blurring into beautiful, painterly shapes. Follow me on Instagram @stylonylon.