Sled dogs

Now that winter combines icy temperatures and bright sunshine, I'm thinking back to the sled dog race in January. Those dogs where so eager to "pull it off" that even after a few kilometers pulling us around the track they still strain against their harnesses to race another round.
Below is one of the teams waiting for the next lap.


Not much in this image qualifies it for a blog about "the abstract" in photography apart from the limited dof the f2.8 aperture produced. Which develops quite nicely along the figures standing in the background and shrouds them (and their distracting details) in a cloud of oof-smoothness. Focus on the sled dogs.

Shadow, shadow on the wall...

I've already shown you an example of the abstractifying powers of shadows there.
Here is another example that conveniently combines abstractification through shadows and oof (and b&w / two-tone in the shadow if you like).

A rose:


The central "gap" through the image is perhaps a bit unfortunate, but as I could neither move the sun nor the rose to another point it had to stay there, separating the subject and its shadowy image...

The Grid - any comments?

Looking at my flickr account I see one photo coming out on top when you count views.

The Grid:


This is a shot made while testing my new Nikon AF-S 50mm f/1.4 G. I used the lens fully open at f/1.4 trying to give a good impression of real-life sharpness and the dof-isolation and oof-rendering that you could produce with it.
I find the interplay of sharp geometric form in the foreground and colorful oof background quite interesting but didn't think much of this photo until I saw that it is almost every day my most viewed photo on flickr - racking up over 10,000 views up to now (the review had over 26,000 hits).

So now I'm wondering whether this is the ultimate test-photo luring the gear-heads to evaluate the qualities of this lens or has the image qualities of its own?
Well I guess it's a little of both reasons.

But I'd really love to hear from you what you think the (hidden) qualities of this photo are - or are not. Feel free to leave a comment! You don't even need to be registered to do so.

Abstractification through dof / oof

Funnily I just stumbled across an image with the title "post abstract expressionist impressionism" that shows pretty well, what dof/oof can do to abstractify your photos:

(c) arthurking83
You can follow the thread about this image here.
This shot is a nice example of mixing sharply depicted abstract graffiti and unsharp realistic scenes (the street) to produce a quite unique photo.