Soft Focus/Yield from my Garden

*A soft focus lens deliberately introduces spherical aberration in order to give the appearance of blurring the image while retaining sharp edges; it is not the same as an out-of-focus image, and the effect cannot be achieved simply by defocusing a sharp lens. Soft focus is also the name of the style of photograph produced by such a lens.
*Wikipedia

I think soft focus might work well for portraits, particularly if the subject has a flawless complexion and I would like to try it one day. At the moment I don’t have access to any one fitting that description so I think flowers might be the next best thing. These hellebores are flowering happily in the garden at the moment and it was a beautiful morning for going out to cut some of them for indoors.

This shot was taken using the ‘soft focus’ setting on my camera. I tried the same shot taken conventionally and then used ‘soft focus’ software but the camera setting gave a better image by far. I also tried using tights over the lens but that just made the whole image look as if it was taken in a fog. Again, I think the tights idea might have worked better on a portrait shot, or if the tights were really fine, but it didn’t work well for the flowers with my Winter denier pop socks. I couldn’t bring myself to go as far as putting vaseline on the filter.

Amazing how few words begin with Y!!!!