… Yes, I changed my background image two days in a row. I’m happy with this one, though, so I’ll be keeping it for a while.

If you’re curious to see what the original photograph was, it looked like this:

I basically took a larger version of that photograph, cropped it, adjusted the brightness and contrast, and applied a Gaussian blur.

Someone asked me about why I add a blur to my background photographs, and I told them that I would answer that in my next blog post, so here’s my response.

An easy example of why I do it is to look at any photograph with a low depth of field. If you take a look at those photos, you’ll notice that portions of it are blurry and portions of it are crisp. The (obvious) point of doing that is to draw attention to the sharper portion and have the blurry portions be con­sidered the background or anything that is not the main subject of the photograph.

By doing this on my website and making the entire background photograph blurry, I am drawing attention to the main content of my website, which would be the text and images embedded inside articles and blog posts. The blur encourages the eyes to concentrate on the crisp main content, but still gives some artistic and aesthetic value by adding color to the page.

A side effect of this is that it also makes the file size smaller. If you are unfamiliar with photography, you might not know yet that the blurrier an image is in .JPG form, the smaller it becomes. The smaller a file is, the faster it loads on the viewer’s computer. I understand that not everybody has blazing fast Internet, so I design my website such that it uses as little bandwidth as possible and loads as quickly as possible. Although this is not the main reason I use a blurred background, it is something that I like about using a blurred background.\