An urban bokeh study

A month or two ago, I had the opportunity to pick up a used copy of Canon's EF 80-200 f/2.8L lens, which I jumped at. I had successfully resisted sinking money into any fancy "L" zooms for a long time, but the chance to pick up this very well-regarded lens at an attractive discount compared to its modern counterpart was too good to pass up.

One of the things that long, fast lenses are good for, of course, is producing tremendous background blur. The quality of the out-of-focus areas of an image is often referred to as "bokeh", reputedly from the Japanese word boke ("blur").

When I went out carrying my new lens, I got in the habit of looking for scenes that might render interestingly with heavy background blur. In this scene, I noticed the pair of signs across the street from each other and wondered how they would look side-by-side at wide aperture.