Bubbles

Recently I was downtown with some fellow photographers in the evening, when we happened upon a couple of men making some money by letting people blow big bubbles in the pedestrian zone. Now, anyone with small children knows that bubbles are an awful lot of fun. Photographers should also know how much fun they can be.

Granted, nighttime is not the greatest time for shooting randomly moving transparent globs, but I found that if you stick with it, you can pull some interesting pictures out of the event. As I've written here before, you can reduce the negative effects of high-ISO noise by converting the pictures to black-and-white. (All but one of these photos were all taken at 3200 ISO.) Yesterday I learned from Vincent Versace at Kelby Training that there is a plethora of ways to turn color pictures into black-and-white. However, these pictures here were desaturated using Lightroom's one-click B/W setting. Then I went back in with the adjustment brush and added selective color here and there to recreate the rainbow effect of the bubble.

Here, too, I used the same tools to recreate the bubble, but this time I framed my friend Renee Cizek in the loop. The background is, after all, nearly as important as the foreground.

Here I wanted the glow from the streetlights to accentuate the bubble. This picture did not see much post-processing.

Although there were some adults enjoying this event, this boy seemed most intent on blowing a huge bubble. This picture seems to tell his story as I saw it.

Sony A77, Minolta f1.7/50mm, f2.5, 1/125 sec, 3200 ISO

Selective color(s) and selective focus help direct our eye to the important part of a photograph. Here I was lucky to get such sharp definition on the bubble.
Thanks again to the men with the bubble juice! Don't forget to leave a tip for such street performers if you enjoy taking pictures of what they are doing.

Sony A77, Minolta f1.7/50mm, f3.2, 1/125 sec., ISO 1600