My proof of the book arrived, and it’s looking fantastic — I just have a few very minor tweaks to make. Yay!

So, in the past installments, I’ve talked about different ways to use the lighting and length of exposure to capture the felling of movement. Another tool at the photographer’s disposal is focus. At the most basic level, the subject can be in focus or out of focus. With a shallow depth of field, though, the focus can be more selective, leaving just parts of the subject in or out of focus.

A Lensbaby is special lens that gives you even greater ability to play focus. The lens is mounded on a flexible tube, and moving the tube can wildly vary what is blurry.

In the above image, I carefully tilted the lens to get Shan’s face as sharp as possible, while trying to blur the rest.

Or the Lensbaby can be used the throw the whole subject out of focus:

That covers most of the techniques I used, but I’ll think I’ll have one more installment so I talk a bit more specifically about the flash-frozen jumping images. If you have any questions about this or other techniques I’ve discussed, ask away!