The conversation prompted me to go and look to see how my garden was fairing. I was pleased to see that there is new growth on the rose that I got on what would have been my Dad’s 80th birthday

It was a good subject for my camera tests.  I know my Dad would love the  photos, he was after all the inspiration for my interest in photography in the first place.

The above article is a little confusing as are the other internet articles on the subject.  In layman’s terms DoF means that when you have focused on the subject of your photograph the camera settings you choose determine how much of the foreground and background is in focus too. It is all to do with lenses and how they work.

For example the first photo was focused on the front bud and the second photo was focused on the third bud.  The two choices create different DoF effects.

When I visited Wenlock Priory recently I tried the ‘Aperture Priority’ setting and struggled with it, despite having recently read the instruction manual…

Today I explored the camera settings to see if I could work them out.  I took a few photos in the garden, checked the results on the computer and the results were not what I wanted. I read the instruction manual again and went into the garden for a second test. I realised that when I was in Wenlock I had inadvertently changed a setting which was affecting the quality of my results. I fixed that and then practiced the DoF (Bokeh) effect.

In non technical terms that means how fuzzy the background is. I wanted to test how much background fuzziness the camera was capable of and I was happy with the results.

In the next few days I will post the effects of my DoF tests but today I want to share with you the snowdrops in my garden

When I looked out onto the patio a couple of days ago I noticed that the rose I bought earlier in the year had unexpectedly produced some more buds.  I thought it had finished flowering for the year some time ago so it was a pleasant surprise and it gave the ideal opportunity for experimenting with my camera.  I managed a little bit of Bokeh, which is always a challenge with a compact camera:

In photography, bokeh^{[pronunciation?]} is the blur,^[1][2] or the aesthetic quality of the blur,^[3][4][5] in out-of-focus areas of an image, or “the way the lens renders out-of-focus points of light.”^[6] 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.^[1] 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.

Bokeh is often most visible around small background highlights, such as specular reflections and light sources, which is why it is often associated with such areas.^[1] However, bokeh is not limited to highlights, as blur occurs in all out-of-focus regions of the image.