Another photo of Douglas Coupland’s Digital Orca sculpture, outside the Vancouver Convention Centre.

For this photograph, I wanted to be able to blur the lights of North Vancouver in the background. However, due to the size of the sculpture, it’s very hard to do this, as you need a wide-angle lens with a very shallow depth of field — something I don’t have.

In order to take this shot I therefore tried the Brenizer Method for the first time. This uses a side-effect of the panorama creation process — by stitching together photos taken with a telephoto lens with a shallow depth of field (in this case, my 1970s Pentacon 135mm f/2.8 prime lens), you are creating a resultant image which is wide-angle but retains the shallow depth of field.

This photo is made up of 20 shots taken at 135mm, f/3.5. Calculating from the resultant panorama, to get this photo in a single shot with my camera, I would have needed a 33mm f/0.85 lens, which I’m pretty sure doesn’t exist!

Even now, there is not as much blur in the background lights as I would like, nor as much separation between the lower half of the sculpture and the background as ideal. I’m pretty happy though, as it’s my first attempt at this technique.