Bokeh.
I wasn't sure where this terminology came from, so I looked it up. Wikipedia is amazing for these types of inquiries. As it turns out, this is a Japanese word. And refers to how a camera catches depth of field and deliberately puts one portion of the photo into sharp focus and the rest in a blur.
I knew the general definition, I was unsure of the origin. Now having been educated, lets get to my failure. In order to do that, I need to put in a little back story (cause there aren't too many stories that can be truly appreciated without the proper backstory).
I am going to call myself a Novice Photographer. I have a camera. I have a kit lens, specifically an 18-55mm lens for my Nikon. I totally love my camera. And we are getting to know each other as time allows, or as I make time. The latter seems to be the case most often.
I do love close up shots of various things, and often find myself gravitating towards these types of shots. And of course, there is the Kitten. She is also something of a focus for me (see what I did there?).
So that has been my general point of interest when looking up the various settings and how to achieve the desired affects I'm aiming to achieve.
With all the settings on the camera, is easy to be overwhelmed by them. YouTube is by far my greatest mentor here. I have burned a lot of time studying Aperture on YouTube. And as I am finding out: It's not that tough to understand the settings, and in my case specifically the Aperture Priority setting (I have not yet delved into full Manual Mode).
So back to Bokeh. My eventual goal is to get the Kitten out and do some good shots, both portraits and some "on the fly" of her just being a Kitten. So I have been randomly practicing. And in general feeling like I am getting the hang of things. And there I was at work, needing to take photos of two potential new hires. And I get this great idea.....
What if I put the agency logo on the big screen and then get a photo of the guys with the bokeh effect. They would be in sharp focus the agency logo would be softly blurred (but obviously recognizable) behind them. This idea had me excited. And I kinda thought it would look freaking awesome.
So I got it set up. Meanwhile, the guys were at one appointment, which was running over the scheduled time, and at that point late for the next appointment. We rushed to the late appointment when they finally arrived, and at the conclusion manage to go over the last bits of info.
And then we went to the setting I had prepared. And here is where I failed.
It felt like I had the setting right. And the general lighting was perhaps a bit dark, but still acceptable. But I left camera on Manual Focus (MF) as opposed to Auto Focus (AF). This was a huge mistake. But not my worst. The worst mistake, and an obviously rookie move, was taking only one picture of each guy.
Wait, what?? Yeah, only one picture. And yeah, they were both poorly focused. And my ISO was too low. So blurry (Bad Bokeh) and dark. Ugh. Why on earth did I not take advantage of the auto-focus? Somehow, in my haste to be done with that part of the day, I had it in my head I needed to have it in MF when using one of the priority modes (which is utterly false!!!). Further, I apparently didn't feel the need to review my handy work.
And thus, 2 blurry photos. Bad blurry. Not the good blurry I was looking for.
And now for what is even worse: these 2 fellows were from out of town. And I sent them packing. And now I am left empty handed.
And feeling foolish. Let's just count this as a lesson learned.
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