![]() The trick is to make sure your shape is centered and small (less than 17 mm for a 50 mm lens). Then, rather than a circle, the out-of-focus bokeh will become the shape of your cut-out. You can cut a small shape into black card stock to make a cover for your lens. (My 50 mm f/1.8, for example, becomes a pentagon shape.) The narrower the aperture, the more you see the blades of your lens shutting down. The wider the aperture, the more it resembles a circle. The circle itself comes from the aperture inside your lens. Bonus: Shaped bokeh using Christmas lightsĪ final twist on Christmas bokeh is to turn those bright circles into more unusual or festive shapes. Shooting at an aperture of f/1.8 kept the statue in focus but the background blurry, and each light on the tree became a bright circle of light. ![]() The small statue was placed across the room from the tree, close to the camera. To create the photograph above, I used the Christmas tree in the background to provide the bokeh lighting and shape. Placing your subject in front of a Christmas tree, decorated house or simply a strand of Christmas lights can make for a lovely bokeh background. Each individual Christmas light is, in effect, a point source of light. The hallmark bokeh effect is how small points of light become rendered as bright, brilliant circles. How to use Christmas lights for fabulous bokeh Zooming closer in on your subject also makes the depth of field more narrow, throwing the background out of focus and creating bokeh. If you do not have a wide aperture lens or are shooting with a point-and-shoot or phone camera, you can use your zoom to create a bokeh effect. Keep the distance between the subject and the background at least twice as great (2) as the distance from the subject to the camera (1). A simple rule of thumb is to remember the ratio 2:1. The farther your subject is from the background, the easier it will be to throw the background out of focus. Separate your subject from the background. Much of the background of your photograph will then be out of focus, which creates bokeh. This will result in a very narrow depth of field. Shoot in aperture priority mode or manual so that you can set your aperture to f/1.8. Shoot with your aperture open as wide as possible.įor example, a 50 mm f/1.8 lens (known colloquially as “the nifty fifty”) is often the first lens that a photographer will buy that produces a great bokeh effect. The key to producing beautiful bokeh is two-fold. Various lenses render bokeh effects differently, and some camera lenses are prized by photographers purely for the look of the bokeh that they create. What is bokeh?īokeh comes from a Japanese word for “blur.” Photographers use the term to refer to the quality of the out-of-focus areas of a photograph. This post provides a quick step-by-step for shooting creative Christmas bokeh photographs. Christmas and holiday light displays offer a fun opportunity for creating unique and memorable photographs.
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