Lets talk about OOFFE. By which I mean “Out-of-focus foreground elements”. It’s a terrible acronym, but the alternative is a mouthful!
Typically in wildlife photography, you want a clear shot of your subject. Sometimes this is difficult to achieve! Particularly with forest birds, who always seem to tuck themselves behind distracting branches. But sometimes we can get those elements to work together to illustrate habitat, and even remove other distractions from the photo. Provided the element is closer to you than your subject and your aperture is wide enough to render it as a soft blur, you can use these bits of foliage to frame your subject.
I like using OOFFE to block out extraneous detail in my photographs – things that are in a similar plane of focus to my subject that would otherwise be sharp or almost sharp, and distract from the subject. I like simple, minimalistic images, and OOFFE can help me achieve these clean looks. The hint of blur sometimes ends up just over the subject – that’s a stylistic choice I make, but you can use them to suit you own tastes.
Like the clean white backgrounds of my “On-white” bird photographs, using OOFFE is a matter of taste. Some people like the ‘dreamy’ look they give, some people dislike it. I think it’s always worth testing out new techniques to see if it’s something that will fit your photographic practice moving forward – some things gel with your personal tastes and others don’t! We’re lucky to have the ease of digital photography to try all these things out at minimal cost.
So give OOFFE a crack! And please help me come up with a better acronym for it…
The original title for this was “Adding Blurry Stuff to your images”, but that’s not a great acronym either…
