Aamir Zakaria Photography

Buddha in the Garden

I took this on a recent trip with my daugh­ter to Kauai, Hawaii.    I’m final­ly get­ting around to post­ing more pic­tures from my backlog.

The issue I strug­gled with here was mak­ing the Bud­dha stand out from the back­ground.   Selec­tive focus (bokeh) is a great way of doing this in-cam­era, but only works well if there is sig­nif­i­cant dis­tance between the sub­ject and the back­ground.  In the orig­i­nal pic­ture, the back­ground bam­boo was more in focus.  I sim­u­lat­ed bokeh in this area by cre­at­ing a blurred out lay­er in Pho­to­shop and using a lay­er mask to “paint” blur­ri­ness into the area behind the Buddha.

I also spent a fair amount of time work­ing with col­or fil­ters to get the grey of the bud­dha to stand out from the yellow/brown of the bam­boo and the green of the leaves.

I hope to start post­ing some pic­tures of mod­els soon.  I haven’t post­ed these to Flickr yet, as they are a sig­nif­i­cant depar­ture from my pre­vi­ous work.  But beau­ty is beau­ty, and cap­tur­ing it is and cre­ative­ly express­ing it is what pho­tog­ra­phy is all about.