Just in case you don’t know, ‘Bokeh’ is the magical little circles that appear when there are light sources or reflections in the area of your image that’s out of focus. When you use a shallow depth of field these can appear in the background of your image and make your photographs (portraits especially!) pop! This is an excellent example of Bokeh:
Image source:
Wikipedia entry for 'Bokeh'
I live in the UK and we (rather unexpectedly!) had a massive amount of snow overnight a couple of weeks back. Wanting to capture this in an unusual way, I experimented with bokeh and flash and this is what I got:
If anyone has accidentally set their flash off whilst it’s snowing, you’ll know you often get a whole lot of overexposed ‘Woah!’ in the foreground and a lot of underexposed ‘Meh’ in the background - NOT good (although I have seen it work!). When I took off autofocus, made everything blurry and fired my flash again, I got lots of different sized glowing circles which gave me an idea.
You can make your bokeh circles any shape you like by cutting out a small template – they are only circular because of the shape of the lens, so I chose to cut out a tiny little star in a piece of card and taped it to the front of my nifty fifty (50mm f1.8) lens to act as a VERY large pinhole. Make your shape about a centimetre at its widest point. Hearts, stars, letters of the alphabet work particularly well.
Shooting again with my template made every independent light source, every reflection and every flash-hit snowflake into the shape of a star!
My tip to you, I guess, is to invest in a piece of card and some masking tape, pick up some fairy lights or go to the fairground and go and experiment – make those portrait backgrounds pop and still-lives sparkle! All you need is a shallow depth of field and various out-of-focus light sources in your background!
Hannah