Behind the Lens – The Story of How This Image Was Created

There are moments in photography when curiosity leads to magic—and this image is one of them. I was drawn to a single tree standing proudly against a dense background of bare branches. The contrast between its lingering autumn leaves and the skeletal forest behind it felt like a visual metaphor for change—life surrounded by stillness.

There’s something hypnotic about the way light dances through a mirror lens. When I captured this scene, I wasn’t just photographing a tree—I was painting with circles of light, transforming ordinary highlights into a constellation of glowing rings that seem to float in midair.

The Technical Choice

For this photograph, I used a mirror lens, a piece of equipment known for its distinctive bokeh and dreamlike rendering. Unlike traditional lenses, mirror lenses create circular highlights, often described as “doughnut bokeh.” These optical rings appear due to the mirror construction within the lens, which blocks the central part of the light path. While some photographers find this effect distracting, I find it wonderfully expressive—it transforms light into texture.

I was working with a 800mm lens—a telephoto that’s surprisingly compact for its reach. Mirror lenses do have their quirks: fixed apertures (usually around f/8) and that polarizing bokeh that photographers either love or love to argue about. But for moments like this, their distinct character is worth every trade-off.

Finding the Scene
This composition came together on an overcast autumn day. The backdrop offered a dark, textured canvas. Against it, a cluster of foliage clinging to its yellow-green fall hues became a natural focal point: a small island of life and colour amid the surrounding browns and grays.

The true magic came from the highlights—light filtering through the branches. Each bright point became a tiny source for the mirror lens’s signature donut-shaped bokeh, creating those distinctive hollow circles that give this lens its unique character.

The Creative Vision
What I love about this image is its balance between abstraction and reality. The sharp cluster of foliage anchors the eye, while the surrounding sea of luminous rings creates a dreamlike atmosphere—like seeing the world through tears or recalling a memory softened by nostalgia.

The composition naturally centers on the foliage, with the brightest bokeh rings clustered around it and gradually fading toward the edges. This subtle gradation adds depth and draws the viewer inward, even within the shallow focus that mirror lenses are known for.

The Challenges
Shooting with a mirror lens comes with its own set of hurdles. Their fixed aperture means you’re constantly balancing shutter speed and ISO to get the right exposure. Depth of field can’t be adjusted through the aperture—what you see is what you get. Manual focus is usually the only option, and with the lens’s distinctive donut-shaped bokeh, achieving precise focus is essential.

Mirror lenses also tend to produce images with lower contrast. To overcome this, careful attention to lighting and post-processing can help: using backlighting or side lighting can enhance tonal separation, while subtle contrast adjustments in editing bring out texture and depth without losing the delicate character of the lens.

That day, the light was soft and muted, the kind that gently wraps around colours rather than striking them. I positioned myself to isolate the tree, using a long focal length to compress the background and bring attention to the shimmering patterns of light within the leaves. The resulting image feels almost painterly—an interplay of focus and abstraction, form and suggestion.

The Result
The final image feels both organic and otherworldly. The donut-shaped bokeh gives the scene a sense of movement and energy, as if the light itself is alive and dancing. It’s a reminder that what we often see as “limitations”—an unconventional lens, tricky weather, or low contrast—can become our most powerful creative tools.

This is the magic of mirror lenses: they compel you to see differently. They’re not subtle, and they’re not suited to every situation. But when the light, the scene, and their quirks align, they can transform an ordinary rainy day into something enchanting—a world where light takes shape, and every droplet tells its own story.

This photograph is not about realism; it’s about impression—about evoking the feeling of standing before that solitary tree, surrounded by the quiet whisper of autumn fading into winter. The mirror lens turned a simple landscape into something poetic—a scene where light dances in circles and imagination fills the spaces between.