ECCG member, Trevor O'Connell came first in Grade A in our recent 'Beautiful Blur' competition with the beautiful image above. This is how he did it:

This was an opportunistic shot,

I took the boys out for a walk in Rostellan woods one day and I brought my camera with my 150-600 mm lens along in the hope I might get a shot of a red squirrel (there are quite a few jumping around the treetops there).

As we were navigating through a particularly narrow and muddy part of the woods we found ourselves enveloped by this long purple heather (I think), so I dropped back from the boys and set my focal length to 200mm and f/5.6 focused on Matthew and took the shot knowing that most of the flowers would be out of focus due to the long focal length and large aperture.

In post, (using Adobe Lightroom) I sucked some saturation out of the greens (I hate saturated greens) and brightened up and sharpened the centre.

It could probably do with being cropped in tighter to draw more attention to the boys as there is a lot of wasted space around the edge which is quite distracting.

Camera: Canon Eos 6d
Lens: Sigma 150-600c
Focal Length: 200
ISO: 100
Shutter Speed: 1/50sec

Well done Trevor!

Click here to see a gallery of images from the competition. Enjoy!

See also:
How I took that Shot - Noelle Lowney
How I took that Shot - Jim Curtin
Competition Gallery
Competition Results and 2016 League Table

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