My dad was trying to use depth of field to really make a subject stand out. For those who don't know, this is the technique where the subject is made to stand out by keeping it in sharp focus while the background is blurred. This prevents the background clutter from drawing attention away from the subject.

Unfortunately, my little point and shoot camera couldn't quite do it. Although the aperture was already at its largest setting, the background was still relatively clear. Here's the original pic.


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After some editing in GIMP, which simply involved selecting the bird out then blurring the background, I get the picture below.


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The background is now nicely blurred while the bird remains in focus. I also did another one without the string, but that one looks fake because the bird then appears to be defying gravity.


Irritatingly, blogspot's photo upload isn't working at the moment so I've probably wasted more space uploading pics which I can't access and can't delete because they don't offer any image management tools.