Customised Photo Bokeh – a fun technique for unique shots

Image by peddhapati used under Creative Commons Licence

Have you heard the term ‘bokeh’? No? It simply refers to that out-of-focus area of your photo where everything blends softly together. It’s a Japanese word that literally means ‘fuzziness’ or ‘dizziness’ and refers to the aesthetic qualities of the area of a photo that isn’t in focus. You’ll already be used to seeing photos that use shallow depth-of-field to produce attractive blurring in the out of focus areas, but what you might not realise is that you can form any bright spots or lights in that area into any shape you choose, using a simple technique. And yes, it’s a little bit cheesy but it is a whole lot of fun.

In the example above, lights positioned behind the book pages have been formed into heart shapes. Hearts and stars are the most commonly used effects, but the sky’s the limit in terms of what you could do. How about musical notes, elephants, snowflakes, fleur de lys, letters, flying birds, diamonds, the eiffel tower? The technique is most effective when you use a sharply focussed foreground object that relates in some way to the bokeh shapes, such as musical notes with a guitar, but it can be fun even if the whole photo is taken up with the blurred bokeh shapes, such as in this heart bokeh image:

Image by Vestman, used under Creative Commons Licence

(Note: just so you know, bokeh doesn’t just refer to the shapes formed by points of out of focus bright light – it’s also used to refer to any area of a photograph which is softly blurred.)

How does this work?

Normally, when you take a shot with the lens wide open any bright spots or lights will form into the shape of the open lens aperture – this will either be a circle or a hexagon, depending on your lens’s construction and the aperture size (cheaper lenses tend to produce hexagons rather than circles). To shape the bokeh, all you need to do is change the shape of the hole the light is coming through. So, instead of the light coming directly through the lens aperture it will now be coming through a shaped aperture stuck to the end of the lens. It’s as if you moved the camera’s aperture to the end of the lens instead of inside of it.

OK, I’m interested – what do I need?

First off, you need a camera that will allow you control over the lens aperture – anything with Aperture Priority (A or Av) on the mode dial will work fine.

Then, you’ll need a lens that will give you a nice, wide aperture – the ideal would be something that opens to f2 or wider, but it’s still worth giving it a go even if your lens won’t go so wide. Remember, though, that the larger the aperture, the more clearly your shapes will be formed.

Finally, you need to make or buy a bokeh-shaping device. There are a couple of ways to make a bokeh shaper for your lens, or you can buy them ready-made (I’ll tell you where later).

The easiest method is to cut a lens insert – this is a circle of black card or thick paper that fits on the end of your lens. You can push it into the end of the lens or just tape it on with masking tape. If you use a screw-in UV filter to fit the insert to, and then simply screw this to the end of your lens, it does make things easier and avoids any risk of damaging the lens coating. If you don’t have a UV filter, just work directly with the lens and take care not to scratch it as you work.

To create the bokeh shapes, you need to cut a small version of your desired shape out of the exact centre of the lens insert, and you can either do this by hand with a craft knife, or use one of the many shape cutters designed for crafting use. Once it’s on your camera, it will end up looking something like this:

Image used under Creative Commons Licence by beerandnoodles

You want to keep the cutout quite small – it should be smaller than the diameter of your lens aperture, or more accurately, it should be smaller than the ‘entrance pupil diameter’, which is actually the size of the aperture as viewed through the end of the lens. There is a formula for working this out and if you’re the techie type then Google the phrase and you’ll find some explanations (the middle link below will also take you to an article where this formula is supplied). For the rest of us, don’t worry too much about it and don’t let a mathematical calculation put you off – just keep your cutout around the size of the one in the picture above and if that doesn’t work out, cut another smaller one and try again.

Another way of making the bokeh shaper is to create a hood rather than an insert, that fits over the outside of your lens rather than being pushed into the end of it. The disadvantage of the hood method is that it can get pushed off accidentally when you focus or zoom. In addition, if you’re going to create a lot of different shapes the inserts are quicker and easier to make.

There are lots of tutorials online, and almost as many variations on exactly how to make the inserts or hoods. The following three are all good in different ways and it’s worth looking at all of them.

Wikihow has a good, heavily illustrated, article that will walk you through the steps of both these methods.

here’s another great article showing you how to make bokeh-shaping inserts and then how to use them. It also tells you how to work out the exact size of opening to make.

this article supplies downloadable templates for you to use.

shaped bokeh kits

OK, you say, it sounds fun but I can’t be bothered with all that DIY stuff. Well if that’s the case, you can buy a kit that will supply you with a set of pre-cut shapes, plus some blank ones to cut your own. The Bokeh Masters Kit comes in three versions:

  • The Demo Kit, which comes with five pre-cut discs in the shape of a star, a heart, a fleur-de-lys, and happy face and a sad face, plus bokeh disc holder. Costs $15 + $6 postage (international)
  • The Master Kit, which has the five discs above plus sixteen more, and a bokeh disc holder. Costs $25 + $6 postage (international)
  • The Advanced Kit, which has the five discs from the Demo Kit, the sixteen discs from the Master Kit, and eight blank discs so that you can make up your own, plus the bokeh disc holder and a wallet to keep everything in. This one costs $35 + $6 postage (international)

If you own a Lensbaby, you can buy the Creative Aperture Kit – Creative Aperture Kit 2 comes with nine pre-cut shapes and costs $25, and the Creative Aperture Kit Blanks comes with ten blank discs for you to cut your own, and costs $9.95. The Lensbaby is ideally suited to creating this effect as it has a very wide maximum aperture on it. It’s too expensive to buy the lens just for this purpose, but if you were thinking about getting one anyway then this could be an added bonus.

How do I go about taking the shot?

First of all, sort out your subject. It doesn’t matter if your lights/bright spots are near or far away – what matters is that they’re out of focus. You can look for ready-made subjects if you like – see below for some ideas – but more commonly you’ll want to set up the shot yourself. Fairy lights are ideal for this, but you could use nightlights, candles, or anything else that gives sharp points of light. For a typical shot, arrange your fairy lights in the background, and if you like, a subject in the foreground.

To decrease the depth of field as much as possible – ie, increase the amount of blur – your background lights should be spaced at quite a distance from your subject. You can also increase the blur effect by using a long focal length – ie, stand back a bit further and zoom in on your subject.

  • Attach your bokeh-shaping insert or hood to the camera lens, making sure it’s the right way up
  • Set your camera to Aperture Priority
  • Open your lens’s aperture up to its widest value
  • Focus on your main subject, checking that the lights arewell out of focus
  • Take the shot

Don’t think your lights have to be in the background. You can have them in the foreground, in front of your subject, as long as they’re kept out of focus. To do this you might have to move your subject further back and then zoom in on it/him/her.

If you want to take a shot of just the lights without a sharply-focussed subject – like the Christmas tree below – simply keep the lights out of focus, either by locking the focus well in front of them or by changing to manual focus and twisting the focussing ring till you get the right effect.

Image by Russ, used under Creative Commons Licence

Also keep an open mind about what to use for your light spots. Although most of the examples here consist of artificial lighting, you can use natural lighting effects as well. The bright shimmer of sunlight on the sea will also produce points of light that will work for this purpose, as will city lights, or sun reflecting off raindrops, or a tree canopy with the sun streaming through.

Get creative!

Once you get the hang of this technique, you can have a lot of fun with it. Look at this image, with bat-shaped bokeh and Batman’s partner Robin in the foreground.

Image by JD Hancock, used under Creative Commons Licence

You can also position the lights in such a way that they work together with your subject to give an interesting effect, as in this image where the lights look like steam coming out of the coffee cup.

Image by Naveen Thomas Prasad, used under Creative Commons Licence

Christmas, with its long dark evenings and proliferation of coloured lights everywhere, is the ideal time to play with this technique.

Image by Gilly Walker, used under Creative Commons Licence

Finally, even if you don’t want the bother of shaping your bokeh, the basic camera technique used without a shaping mechanism can produce beautiful results simply by allowing the normal bokeh shape of your lens aperture to work its magic. In the shot below you can see the hexagonal shapes produced by the lens used.

Image by Johan Blomstrom, use under Creative Commons Licence

Resources

Even if you don’t own a Lensbaby, there’s lots of inspiration on their site for ways to use this effect:

have a video on Youtube showing some pretty inventive ways of using shaped bokeh. No instructions, just lots of inspiration.

is rapidly becoming the place to go for inspiration. Put ‘bokeh’, ‘custom bokeh’, or ‘shaped bokeh’ into the search box and stand back.

to save you having to search back through the text, here are the three ‘how-to’ article links already given in the main body of the article: