One photo a day challenge: Day 26.

For today’s photos I wanted to return to the idea of photographing something I had available in my house. I’ve had a pair of new shoes sitting in their box that I haven’t opened yet. I decided to see if I could create some interesting photographs using those.

Lens Choice

I wasn’t sure if I wanted to use my 60mm macro lens to get up close or use my 50mm f1.8 lens to minimize depth of field. The 50mm lens seemed like the right choice. I wasn’t sure exactly how I was going to do this. And it turned out to be a little more difficult than I thought to generate creative images.

I knew that I wanted to photograph the subjects of my photos at as close a range as I could get with the 50mm lens. This would help create as much isolation of the point of focus from the background as I could achieve.

Changing Subjects

The shoes were moved and rearranged and I adjusted position. I changed angles and focus points.

Our dog Colton was lieing on the floor next to me as I was crouched on the floor photogrpahing the shoes. So I snapped a few photos of him. Who can resist photographing a cute dog.

I eventually positioned the shoes in front of of the doorway. The perspective had me looking down the hallway. The shoes were close to me and the end of the hallway was off in the distance. This provided a soft bokeh to the rest of the image in contrast to the focus on the subject.

As I was photographing the shoes our Maine Coon cat, Paisley strolls down the hallway towards me. So of course I take advantage of this situation and I photograph her. She actually sits at just the right spot and stays still which is key because there wasn’t much light and the shutter speed was slow.

Then I switch from focusing on her to focusing on the shoes. This created an interesting image with a section of the shoes in the foreground and in focus and Paisley soft and out of focus in the background. This was probably a more interesting image than I could have created on my own if I had tried.

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