nose | little home by hand

I am working like crazy to finish that d*** thesis and because I have nothing else to talk about I thought I’d to a very ‘technical’ photography post for once. I hope I’m not boring y’all too much, but I will put some pretty pictures in here for compensation 🙂

I just love shallow depth-of-field and bokeh. It’s not easy to achieve without a DSLR though.
Before I got my 50mm 1.4 lens I used to always shoot wide open, that is, opening up the aperture to its biggest opening/smallest number. With my Canon 450D that depended on the lens I was using (f4.5 on the kit lens 18-55mm and the 70-300mm and I think f3.5 on my dad’s 28-135mm). Before I got my DSLR however, I had a Fuji S5600 (a bridge camera) and even though the smallest f-stop was 2.8 it wasn’t easy getting that lovely bokeh.

There are a couple of tricks of course but for those great macro shots of flowers and such I opted to buy a snap-on macro lens, the Raynox DCR-250. Wow, that opened up a whole new world!
This shot was taken on my balcony, it shows raindrops in a spider web:

Those macro lenses reduce your area in focus to nearly a pinpoint so they take a LOT of practice. Your first 100 or so images will be blurry, trust me. But when you get to know that lens a little, boy, will you have fun!
This one was taken on the same rainy day, on the bamboo which since has not survived my gardening skills (seriously who manages to kill bamboo? they’re like the most undemanding plants ever):

I have a lovely close-up of ladybugs somewhere on another harddrive but since I am too ~~lazy~~ busy to search for it (and dying to get back to my thesis…kidding here) I will safe that for another day and leave you with a picture of my sweet kitty’s nose…it kind of sparkles in the sun…vampire kitty anyone??