Along with my lens-dirt experiment, I’ve been fiddling with bokeh in the wake of the fake depth-of-field effects in the new iPhone. It’s kind of fun to see the bright points in my image become constellations of discs when I feed Photoshop an HDR. I think I might like to do some more human-scale work in the future so I can use effects like this more often. (I also finally got the Smart IBL system to work as intended. Pro-tip: Don’t put every SIBL setup you ever downloaded into it’s source folder. It does not like browsing through many dozens of HDR environments. I just started moving in whatever one I wanted to use to the SIBL folder, using the plugin to generate the scene, and then saving that for future uses.)

There should probably be something in the foreground that’s in focus. I originally planned a more elaborate setup that would include foreground elements, but it would’ve required some amount of prepwork, and my new job has limited my time and energy in the evenings. I’m doing some interesting stuff there, and I’m looking forward to being able to share more about it, but the only thing keeping me going on this project for the next thirty-nine days is my sheer stubbornness. Getting ahead on scene-setup did help considerably a couple weeks ago. Hopefully I’ll be able to bank more than a few shots this weekend.

Hm, that out-of-focus puddle would look really good in an animation…

One of those images that includes a positively desperate amount of bloom and grain to salvage it.

Also, I need higher-resolution explosion photography. These years-old sample images aren’t cutting it anymore. Though in this day and age, it’s probably almost easier for me to just switch to pure-3D fire effects.