Texan Mosaic

  Photos are from students in COMM 1318 Photography 1. Featured photo by Gavin Carr.

Photography students at South Plains College blurred the background

and sharpened their creativity with a recent bokeh project.

 It’s all about adjusting a camera’s aperture to create a shallow depth of field.  

The resulting background blur is a technique called bokeh, meaning “haze” or

“blur” in Japanese.

 To achieve the effect, students first changed lenses to one offering a wide

aperture of f1.8. 

Then, in a darkened TV studio, they used flashlights to light whatever object was

up close.  Strings of Christmas lights in the background became blurred.

Sometimes students covered their lenses with dark paper with cut outs of hearts,

stars, and butterflies.  The paper tricks the camera’s aperture so the background

lights take on the shapes of the cut outs.

Presto.  It’s like magic. 

These are some of their best shots.