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What's with the name?


(Courtesy of Wikipedia)

In photography, bokeh is the blur, or the aesthetic quality of the blur, in out-of-focus areas of an image, or "the way the lens renders out-of-focus points of light." Differences in lens aberrations and aperture shape cause some lens designs to blur the image in a way that is pleasing to the eye, while others produce blurring that is unpleasant or distracting— "good" or "bad" bokeh, respectively. Bokeh occurs for parts of the scene that lie outside the depth of field. Photographers sometimes deliberately use a shallow focus technique to create images with prominent out-of-focus regions.

And... begin


A few years ago I started this site as a way to concentrate on my photography. My goals at the time were pretty unfocused; I spent a few weeks roaming around San Francisco with a small, newly-acquired digital camera, light meter, bubble level and tripod making (mostly) black and white infrared images of places in the city:


eBkokeh.com - Washington Square Park, San Francisco, CA                       eBkokeh.com - Ferry Building, San Francisco, CA


I quickly got fed up with the digital camera and returned to the medium and large format cameras I'd been using for years. Over the course of about 4 years that site has evolved into a collection of (again mostly) black and white 6x6cm images. It's forced me to visit places I've been tens or even hundreds of times before with a new perspective and caused me to slow down and really take note of what is around me. I've refused to crop images on that site and compose every image to be presented in it's naked form: a full-frame square picture with only levels adjusted and dust removed in photoshop:


eBkokeh.com - Frozen Branch, Yosemite National Park                       eBkokeh.com - Tuolumne River, Yosemite National Park


That body of work continues to grow and I look forward to many more evenings with a pile of exposed film, a kitchen sink full of tanks, rolls of 120 film hanging from the shower curtain rod to dry and endless nights of scanning.

What's always seemed to be missing from my recent photography is a sense of spontaneity. Every image is carefully composed, filtered, metered, shot, processed and scanned. Sometimes weeks or even months pass between when the image was shot and when I'm able to post it. I hope to be able to share these new images within days, or the same day that they're shot.

The last 8 years have mostly passed me by in terms of digital image processing and practices so I'm going to use this site to focus on digital photography, image processing and manipulation. My interests lie in RAW processing, HDR and creative uses off-camera lighting. I plan to concentrate on those things as well as others.

Over the past 4 years I've developed a solid reader base and made friends with people in different parts of the country and the world. I hope to continue in that tradition with this site. As always feel free to drop me an email anytime or leave a comment (at either site). Thanks for visiting!




                                                                                                  Near Vernal Falls, Yosemite National Park :: March 2010



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