[juacali]

Hi all...the photo was shot in a shaded area. Some post processing in Photoshop to sharpen it. I am wondering is it possible to achieve great bokeh with the kit lens on a Pentax K-r? Thanks

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[alamo5000]

Use point focus if its available on your camera. Get close as possible to your subject and if needed use the flash.

The shot below was shot with a Tamron 70-200 @200mm f18 or so...natural light, no flash. Stopping down (using a higher f#) can work well or you can open wide open... but I would suggest playing around with a depth of field calculator so you can see what you are getting in that regard.

Most importantly though pay attention to your composition. When you have lights and darks so contrasting each other even in the background it makes the photo kind of weird. Shoot from a different angle if needed... get on a step ladder and shoot down or up or something...but you should always pay attention to your background and its proximity to you and the colors presented.

Everything in front of your lens makes your photo. Darks on darks sometimes makes a weird photo. You want to make something stand out. I read a good chapter in a book that mentioned 'composing with color'...it will all add up in the end.

[juacali]

Thanks for the comments alamo500. Your shot is excellent, obviously i have to step up my skill by reading and practicing. The location where i shot the picture is heavily wooded so how would one reduce the darks'..While at it am using the kit lens.

[alamo5000]

Thanks for the comments alamo500. Your shot is excellent, obviously i have to step up my skill by reading and practicing. The location where i shot the picture is heavily wooded so how would one reduce the darks'..While at it am using the kit lens.

I struggle with that too. Where I live is right in the middle of a 250 square mile national forest full of huge pine trees. So far I have no answer for you except to pay attention and look at your angles that you are shooting from.

Other people might have better ideas...

[baro-nite]

Nothing wrong with the bokeh here, other than having highlights that are very bright and distract from the subject. When you are focused this close, you don't need to be wide open to blur the background nicely, while wide open gives you very little DOF for the subject, so try this at f/8 or so. As alamo5000 suggest, flash is also very helpful for macro, preferably off-camera or at least well diffused.

[JinDesu]

Several comments:

1) You can get pretty good bokeh from the kit lens. It depends heavily on the subject location, and the distance of the background. In this case, you have a small subject so you had to get close to it, and the background was very far from it.

2) The composition is the weakness here - as others have said, the large bright area in the background is distracting. In addition, the spider itself is a little soft (out of focus?). As the spider is in the center of the frame, it could use a bit more sharpness.

3) If not for the large bright area, everything else probably would have worked out well together. In a situation where you don't get that much of a choice, what you can do is expose a bit darker to preserve those highlights, and then fix in post. You would do highlight/shadow recovery in Photoshop - I say expose a bit darker because once highlights are blown, there's nothing you can do to recover that area. The k-r should perform just as well as my k-x, and I've recovered shadows that look almost black in some cases. After shadow/highlight recover, some tweaking of saturation and vibrance will get the image looking pretty normal.

4) Flash is a good solver of foreground darkness/background brightness. Just gotta learn how to use it. Another alternative is - if the subject isn't moving, and you have enough light, do a 3 bracket shot of -1EV, 0EV, and 1EV and combine in photoshop with the HDR merge.

One last thing from reading your settings - 1/45s is a bit slow, and your aperture of F5.6 suggests you were shooting at 45-55mm. The slight blurriness could be from motion blur. On the k-r, I wouldn't be worried about using ISO up to 800, even 3200 outdoors in good light. Better to have a little more noise and no motion blur, than to have any motion blur from hand shaking.

[juacali]

I am grateful for all the comments...

[wildman]

My take on it for what it's worth....

[MSL]

As @wildman shows you can still tweak a lot out of the image. I include my own quick modifications, playing with shadows, highlights and contrast in FastStone.
Lots of good advice already, The one big problem is the shooting angle which gave you the bright spots in the top corner. Get rid of those and you have a much narrow histogram to start with, giving you more latitude for post processing.

[juacali]

Will take up the suggestions. The tweaks are doing the photo justice....