Tag Archives: Bokeh photography

For iPhone users that are fans of Bokeh photography, Lumiè has you covered!

The Bokeh effect is a blur… with a bit of classic flare. Not the blur I have been covering in the past where your attempting depth, rather the blur you get a lot with old Polaroid photographs. A flash of light from a source you didn’t expect that causes a artistic wash out. I use it a lot with my black and white photography, In the case of the art of Bokeh effect photography, the bright areas get some flare with shapes. These are those fun circles, hearts, stars and streaks of light dancing around a photograph. Not for everyone’s taste, but done right the images can be unique and thought provoking… oh yea, and cute fun too.

The Lumiè app (iPhone only) takes the uncertainty of getting the effect right when photographing and moves the effect to a series of filters. You can take a photo through the app or import from the iPhone photo library. Lumiè wants a square photo so the first step after import is to crop the photo, than onto the ‘effects’. Sweep your finger across the screen to choose an effect… there are many to choose from. Tap one to select, if you don’t like the effect, just tap the image to bring up the chooser again. There is also a picker in the lower left corner for the the image to be ‘normal’, ‘dark’, or add ‘sparkle’ to the filter.

The final image can be save and shared by it’s self or with a ‘paper’ frame similar to those old Polaroids. Sharing can be done directly from Lumiè to Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Timblr, save to your iPhone photo library or attach to an email.

 

Fixed depth and Multi Focus Photography with the iPhone

Beyond Tilt Shift effect is the whole science of blurring out an area of a photo for an added effect… it’s called Bokeh. Tilt Shift is the focus of a single point to fool the eye into ‘seeing’ a depth that isn’t there. Bokeh is more about the effect of a blurred area causing a feeling for the photograph. The ‘out of focus’ area can be strong or light for different effects.

An app that goes beyond ‘simple’ Tilt Shift is SynthCam. Rather than just blurring everything outside of an area on a single photograph, SynthCam takes grabs 30 frames a second to see what your eye sees. The app relies on you aiming it’s camera at a object and moving side to side a slight bit (not forward/back!) over the ‘in focus’ object so SynthCam can learn the distance of that object. If you have multiple items you want in focus, you can do the process several times for SynthCam to learn each item’s depth. This mean a complicated object like a flower or a person can be central to the final image instead of a circle or blocked area. It has taken some practice to learn the amount of movement to get the right result, but this is digital so it doesn’t cost anything to take a lot of image attempts.