Getting in the holiday spirit

This year I feel like I know my camera enough to experiment a little with it during the holidays. You can probably tell I'm a bokeh addict and I never shoot anything with an aperture higher than 2.8 (I would go lower, but that's as low as I can go, right now).

A few weeks ago, I pondered about bokeh and shapes. My friend Melissa pointed me toward this great website. It shows you how you can make an adapter for your lens to create shaped bokeh from surrounding lights. I showed the idea to Gene and asked if his computerized laser could cut the shapes for me. (I'm worse than a preschooler with scissors). I bought some cardstock and told him the dimensions and he went to town.

Heres what they look like...he cut a variety of shapes and sizes for me, not really knowing what would work.


He made them so they go between the lens and the filter.... like so


Heres what it looks like.... I had to manually unfocus because I didn't have a subject I could put in my foreground to give me an adequate depth of field for the optimal bokeh. I was at a tree trimming party at a friends house and just couldn't wait to try. (Hopefully when we get our tree up later this week I can try out some more).



A few with a full perspective of the tree...




Gene had me be a model so we could try it with a subject in the photo.... (its dark, but you get the picture)


I found that the star shaped worked the best. The snowflake did ok, but it cut off more of the shape then I liked. The heart may have been too big and it was just and odd shaped blob, not really a heart.

Stay tuned for more pretty shaped bokeh posts!