Bokeh is such a pretty photographic style: one item is clearly visible and everything else is softly out of focus. How hard could it be, I thought, to set my camera’s aperture as wide as possible, with a fast shutter speed?
On this beautiful day, I brought a little fabric floral arrangement from a long-ago wedding to Flushing Meadows Corona Park. In the shade of a gazebo, I realized that my Coolpix lens doesn’t go any wider than f3.7, not enough to blow out the background.
It was too pleasant a day, though, to stay disappointed. I focused on the pictures I could make instead, and on the opportunity to be in the iconic park on a day when it’s not crowded. (Hint: The museum is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, so parking is more plentiful on those days.)
There’s a way to bokeh, I’m sure, using this camera. This is the perfect time of year for some visual experiments.
The Linda Life 
I don’t know which coolpix you have. I’ve had a couple of them, an L120 and a P610, I love them but bokeh is very difficult because the auto focus is pretty good and the aperture range of the lens is pretty tight. If you don’t have an adjustable aperture (on the P610 you can adjust aperture in the P mode using a dial, but the L120 doesn’t have that feature) you can put the camera in macro mode and put something close to the camera to focus on, that can cause the farther away things to be out of focus, with a little experimentation you might be able to put the in focus item at a location where you can crop it out. Another possibility is to force the camera to infinity focus using landscape mode then have the bouquet really, really close.
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I have the S9900 that includes manual, aperture priority and shutter priority modes. Thanks for your generous advice. I plan on trying everything you said!
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Like your word play and if I saw this 3 days ago I commended in enhancing my vocabulary. I applied bokeh in my offering without realizing that is what it is called but has since stumbled upon it on a fellow focus blogger a few days ago
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Abrie, your shallow focus images are amazing! https://abriejoubert.wordpress.com/2017/06/18/great-photography-is-about-depth-of-feeling/
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Thank you Linda really apprecite you remark. By the way I actually saw afterwards that the term bokeh was used in the challenge, but i only read the above the photo. This week with transient I read the whole thing twice trying to figure out where I will go with this and my ideas is proving tob be transient a real impermanence to them, but hopefully i will get there…
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