Fun with Lights (Bokeh!)

The holidays are here and those twinkling little Christmas lights make amazing backdrops for family portraits. When there's some distance between your cuties and the lights, the lights turn into lovely circles of light. You know what I'm talking about. Those light circles are called "circles of confusion" or "bokeh". I came across a great blog that gave instructions on how to make those out-of-focus lights even greater.

See how the lights make a little circle blurs? That's what bokeh looks like normally.

Kevin & Amanda's blog instructions call for black cardstock. I had no black around, just colorful file folders. A little color & personality shouldn't hurt, right? And they taped their pieces together from the inside, which looks much nicer, but I think tape on the outside holds stronger. Wish I had my friend's super cool fun colored tapes at this point. Anyway, as you can tell, I got a little happy with this project and tried different shapes and different levels of detail / intricacy. To make it easier to change out the bokeh design, I made some pockets on either side of the holes.

The slits are pockets to slip in the bokeh designs quickly and easily.

Here's the cover with my heart bokeh design in place.

So what do effect does this have on the pictures? Check it out. These shots were taken casually, handheld, using available light.

With the snowflake design. Lights that are in focus aren't affected by the cover, only light spots which are out of focus will take on the shape.

Holly design

Hearts. Greater distance and greater blur creates larger bokeh effect, but they also become overlapped.

I tried a triple heart design here, but I think it's too busy.

Dollar sign! This might be fun for commercial concepts.

Holiday wreath. Cute for the holidays.

Couldn't resist trying a Virginia Tech logo.

My big girl thought these effects were pretty cool and asked for a smiley face one.

Yes, a Hello Kitty one for my girls.

The little one loves Hello Kitty.

The tutorial recommends a lens with a huge aperture (1.8, 1.4) which allows you to create greater blurs in smaller space. While I love my 50mm 1.4, it's not ideal for chasing small children. So I created a bokeh design cover for my 24-70mm 2.8 macro lens. Happily, it works GREAT.

I love how dainty the bokeh hearts are in the background. I had my two year old hold a white notepad to reflect light back up to her face. Love her face!

Testing out the distance & effect by holding a string of lights. My hand is arm's length away. And it's a 5 foot string of light. This shows you don't need a huge room or a fancy lens to take advantage of this.

I'm about 95% sure these cute bokeh designs will make an appearance in this year's holiday cards. If you see a crazy photographer with purple cardboard on her camera running around Salt Lake, feel free to come up and sneak a peek at the shots I'm getting. :)

Hope you get some great holiday shots!

Mui Chao
Photographic Artist
SimplyMui Photography, LLC