Weekly Photo Challenge – Focus

The topic for this week’s weekly photo challenge is Focus inspired by Matthew George’s post on focus, in which he talks about highlighting the subject of your picture frame using the concept of depth of field. Using this concept and playing with the aperture settings, a single sight can be captured in multiple ways thereby making your audience concentrate on different subjects with each frame.

For this topic, I have decided to share my picture of an Indian Roller bird that I clicked in the jungles of Rajasthan last winter. When I first saw this bird, I just gaped at it for a while as I was so awestruck with its colors and then I remembered my camera and clicked this bird in about 12 different poses. I guess it enjoyed my foolishness and hence decided to humor me by patiently sitting and modeling for me 🙂 In this pic, I have just focused on the bird, resulting it to be sharp and the resulting background to be blurred.

The Indian Roller posing for my camera

As a quick introdction to the Indian Roller – This is also called the Blue Jay and commonly found all over India perched on the roadside, in the grasslands or in the scrub forests. It is a stocky bird with a brown breast, blue crown and vent. The wings are deep purplish with a band of pale blue. The tail is sky blue, and the central feathers are dull green. It is associated with the legend of Lord Shiva (who is known to have drunk poison as a kid, resulting in the blue throat) and hence called “Neelkanth” (blue throat). But the best known feature about this bird is the aerobatic displays of the male during the breeding season and in the fight for teritory. This display includes bill-up displays, bowing, allopreening, wing drooping and tail fanning. I havent seen this yet but would love to someday 🙂

You can check out additional posts on this topic here.