With my journalism training, I usually approach photography as a record of reality, not an artistic medium. In the past I have used Photoshop Elements to correct color and contrast, and apply some sharpening. Now that I have full Photoshop, there is the temptation to do more. One feature new to me is Lens Blur, often also referred to as Bokeh although they are not exactly the same thing. I have a 500mm f/4 lens, so I know how the choice of lens and f/stop affects background blur. The blurred background you see in most of my images is what came out of the camera. But I have been shooting with the 70-300mm lens at f/11 on these motion trigger images the past few days, so the background is out of focus but not totally blurred. These two versions of an image from today are before and after the application of Photoshop Lens Blur. If you flip back and forth between the two images of the sparrow and look at the stripe on top of the bird's head, you see where Photoshop doesn't quite get it right. There is bit of pixelation at the boundary between the blurred and unblurred parts of the image, and the very end of the tail got clipped off. I suppose it is impressive that Photoshop does it as well as it does, but I still don't know how I feel about this.
The wind picked up during the day and eventually I got tired of hearing the 1D click at nothing, so no "Flicker of the Day," just the sparrow. The hummingbird is from June 8 and is an example of real lens blur from the 500mm lens nearly wide open at f/5.6. The camera for all of these is the Canon 6D Mark II #12.
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