Flowers of Light: Bokeh Challenge

This is a continuation of my "You Inspired Me" photography challenge. You can see the results of these challenges here.

This week, a friend challenged me with this photo from my favorites:

By jegoble over on Flickr.

What I liked about the source picture was the Bokeh in the background, and the mysterious quality of the light in the foreground, especially the near translucent appearance of the candle. Those were the qualities that I tried to duplicate in this week's challenge.

Originally I planned to use a candle in the foreground and some Christmas-tree lights in the background. However, the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to do something completely different but that captured the same lighting/bokeh magic. These pictures are what I ended up with:

There are several elements of these that I think turned out rather well. I love the bokeh in the background, and I thought that the lighting in the foreground is lovely. I also think that the composition turned out relatively well. I do wish that I had more of these flower lights to use, as that would have allowed for a slightly more complex composition, but all in all, I am happy at how the challenge turned out.

I will post next week's challenge shortly.

Inspired By: Photography Challenge

To all my photography friends:

This is a new project that I have been working on. The idea behind this set is to improve my creativity and technical abilities.

We all love to look at each other's pictures. That is why we are on Flickr in the first place, right? And we favorite those pictures that inspire us or move us in some way. But the idea is not to just admire other people's work, but to allow their creativity to inspire us.

I have decided that every week (or so) I will select one photo from my favorites (or allow one of you to challenge me by selecting one for me), and then attempt to duplicate what inspired me about that particular photo.

The idea is NOT to replicate other people's work exactly, but to attempt to create something original that duplicates the technique, idea, or emotion that caused me to favorite the photo in the first place.

I think that this is an excellent way of improving my abilities as a photographer, and I invite anyone who is interested in doing this challenge with me to drop me some flickrmail. I will select photos to challenge you from your favorites, and you can select photos from my favorites to challenge me, and we can write about our experiences. Doing this together can provide added motivation and inspiration. I will be writing about each week's challenges here.

You can see the results of these challenges here.

This week, a friend challenged me with this photo from my favorites:

By jegoble over on Flickr.

What I liked about this picture was the Bokeh in the background, and the mysterious quality of the light in the foreground, especially the near translucent appearance of the candle. Those will be the qualities that I will be attempting to duplicate in this week's challenge, and I will post the result here when it is finished.

Wish me luck.