Bokeh

The word Bokeh, is a Japanese word for mental haze, from which comes bokeh photography, or the blurring of background highlights into shapes.  I very much enjoyed taking these photos and creating the bokeh effect by manipulating my camera settings.  While I like how all my images turned out, my favorite of the three is the first horizontal image of the cactus figure.  To my mind, the image evokes a sense of a desert night.  The viewer is up on hill overlooking a desert valley, with the cactus in the foreground light by the light of the moon.  In the background, the beige carpet seems to represent the sandy desert landscape, with the lights on the floor symbolizing a small desert town, the lights the many windows of the homes and buildings below in the desert oasis.  Furthermore, the lights hanging in the background seem to symbolize the millions of stars one may see on a clear desert night.  So while this is simply still life photography with bokeh, the image represents for me a much greater sense of a calm desert night under the stars.