Hello, beautiful friends! If we haven’t met before, I’m Kathryn Osgood of @blondieandbears and Little Bear Photography. I was so excited to be invited to talk to you about one of my favorite things - bokeh! The short and colder days of winter mean you’ll be forced to shoot more often in low light and indoors. Finding fun and interesting ways to use light and bokeh is a great way to make the best of it and bring some holiday sparkle to your photos.
I’ll be discussing lighting choices, how to get bokeh with (almost) any lens, and a few fun experiments for you to practice and play with bokeh.
First of all, did you know that bokeh is not the same thing as just background blur? It’s a slightly pedantic difference, but bokeh specifically refers to the aesthetic of out of focus points of light - usually rendered as circular balls. It’s important to keep that in mind, because when you are looking to incorporate bokeh, you need to think about the light, and how to get it out of focus. Sunlight streaming through leaves on a tree, string lights on a Christmas tree, and street lamps/signs are all great ways to practice achieving the bokelicious photo of your dreams, but don’t limit yourself: there are so many ways to experiment with light! Ideally multiple tiny sources of light, which are easier to render out of focus - so think of reflective and sparkly surfaces. Water, snow, city lights, reflections on windows - even backlit dust particles can make a dreamy bokeh background or foreground.
Lantern Bokeh with 35mm lens
While telephoto and medium telephoto lenses (think 85mm and longer) are really ideal for creating beautiful bokeh, you can actually get bokeh on almost any lens - even your iPhone. Once you understand how and why bokeh occurs, it’s easy to replicate those conditions on the equipment you already own. If you have a kit lens or wide angle that doesn’t have a very wide aperture, you can still get some bokeh by placing your subject very close to your lens, and keeping your sparkly background proportionally far from your subject. Open your aperture as wide as it goes, and keep tweaking the distances until it works. If you’re using an iPhone or a camera that doesn’t allow you to manually select your aperture, you can shoot in lower light to force it. Remember to keep your subject far from the background light sources in order to maximize your bokeh effect. If you have a wide angle or lens that doesn’t have a wide aperture, you’ll need to stay fairly close to your subject to make it work. Sometimes this means it needs to be literally inches away from your lens/camera.
Aww look at the iPhone bokeh
Practice
If you’re a giant nerd like me, you’ll enjoy taking a few opportunities to practice different techniques to add fun bokeh to your photos in camera, without using overlays or multiple exposures.
Shoot through string lights
This is a super easy and fun technique that is guaranteed to lift you out of a rut and add some instant gratification to your bokeh needs. You can buy battery-powered fairy lights and keep them in your camera bag - try looping them around your lens, or holding sections right in front of your camera to frame your subject. Make sure that you are choosing your focal point and forcing those lights to be out of focus.
Shot with a 35mm lens through fairy lights
Create fun bokeh shapes
Take your lens cap and lay it down on a piece of construction paper (preferably a dark color, but any opaque paper will likely work). Trace and then cut out your circle and then fold the circle in half so you can make a symmetrical design. I free-cut a heart design, but you can also draw it first and then cut it out. Make sure your shape is on the smaller side, but not too teeny, or you’ll have excessive vignetting on your images. It may take a few tries to get it the right size! Aim for about half an inch. Fit your construction paper circle onto your lens (ideally while using a protective filter), and tape it down to the side of your lens so it doesn’t slide around. Be careful not to interfere with your camera’s ability to focus!
heart-shaped bokeh with 50mm lens
Using construction paper to create heart-shaped bokeh
Experiment with layers of bokeh
Use layers of light points to create bokeh of different sizes to create depth in your images. Or use string lights to create bokeh leading lines. Incorporate foreground and background bokeh.
Snow bokeh with strings lights in the foreground using 35mm lens
Above all else - have fun!
Don’t be afraid to try wild things and fail miserably - it’s true what they say about learning more from your mistakes than your successes. Push your boundaries and have fun!
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