Morning Light

I try to make it a point to have my D200/50mm combination with me at work, because I never know when a photographic opportunity will present itself. (It’s one of the nice things about working on a college campus–there’s always something going on around here.) On this particular morning I drove my car instead of riding my bike, and as I walked past one building on the way to my office I saw this series of lights that looked like it make for an interesting depth of field illustration. With the sun rising low on the eastern horizon the street and surrounding architecture were lit up just barely enough to have kind of a nice warm glow, and these lights served as a nice accent to the coming daylight. I shot this at f/1.8 to get a bit of depth of field, and my idea was to show how the lights got progressively out of focus as they receded into the background. I’m not sure if it worked quite like I hoped, since the other four lights in the photo kind of melded together into one extended yellow blur, but combined with the street lights I think you get the idea. Some of the shots I have posted to Weekly Fifty recently could easily have been taken with a kit lens, but not this one. To get nice blurry backgrounds like this, you really need a big ol’ aperture–unless there is a good deal of distance between your subject and the background, in which case a smaller aperture would work fine.