I’m always looking for new ideas and techniques to try with my camera, especially if they are cheap or free. I saw this on Flickr’s blog and I couldn’t resist. Bokeh is a Japanese term for the area that is out of focus in a picture. Lenses that have a open aperture produce a shallow depth-of-field and can keep some objects in focus while throwing other objects out of focus. The 50mm f/1.8 lens is perfect for these kinds of shots (or even the 50mm f/1.4 if you’ve got the money.) Points of light give a nice circular bokeh shape from the blades inside the lens, but if you put a filter on the front of the lens, you can control the shape of the objects by giving the lens a custom aperture.
It’s not hard to create the filter. I took a piece of cardboard and cut a star shape out of it. Then I built a little collar around the filter to make it easy to mount onto the lens. I used some electrical tape to put it together so that light wouldn’t leak into the connections where I taped the cardboard together. Admittedly, I’m not really an arts and crafts type of person, so it’s not perfect, but it’s not bad for a first try.
Here’s the filter mounted onto my lens.
The result is some pretty cool pictures, especially with Christmas trees and Christmas lights….
I’m looking forward to trying this out on some other Christmas lights around the house and perfecting it, but it’s a lot of fun for not a lot of money.