I also tried the Lytro Illum, which I bought last week. I was pretty sure it wouldn’t work very well & it turned out I was right. It doesn’t handle low light very well (and I’m completely spoiled with the α7sii & an F/1.4 primary), but worse, it doesn’t capture any depth at such a large distance. So I have a few of those photos but I won’t bother sharing them.

Instead these last two photos have tilted focal planes, rather than a pull-focused-exposure.

After feeling a bit disappointed that the flowery effect wasn’t working well I decided to just record video, so these are the last 14 minutes of the show (which was about half an hour long total). It’s kind of a lot to watch, so I recommend skipping to ~4 minutes 50 seconds where I play with the focus.

With the longer exposures I had to close the aperture quite a bit, so the “flowery” effect is pretty limited. (I figure I’ll cut some polarizing filters to cut the light down so I can open it back up.) The video demonstrates just how big the bokeh can really be. (I had the same problem recently trying to photograph planes at Logan Airport. That’ll be another use for the polarizing filters.)

Before the show I wandered around town a bit looking for interesting things to photograph. The one thing that really caught my attention was how this vine was climbing this guy wire.

For some reason power lines & telephone polls, and electrical equipment, have always been favorite photographic subjects for me.

Earlier in the day my brothers’, their wives, and my nephew, came to my mom’s house. Here’s my nephew Max (and his mom Nicole is next to him in the background).