Bokeh Shapes

Happy Valentines Day!!!

So last night I was doing my son's first Valentines Day portraits. I had a plan that I wanted try. I wanted to set a backdrop with white Christmas lights on the back drop and then put some Valentines Day hearts and other props in the back ground. I figured I could put some distance between my son and the backdrop so I could try to get some bokeh effect from the lights behind him.

I then used 2 flashes with white umbrellas at about 45 degrees off to to each side in front of him. 1 of those flashes was 2 stops brighter than the other one. Then I put another flash behind my son just out of frame pointed at the back drop. This flash I put a red gel on and turned the power on that flash to its lowest setting and turned the zoom on that flash up to around 70 mm so its light would be more directed toward the back drop.

To compensate for the abundance of light produced by the flashes and so I could see the Christmas lights I slowed my shutter speed down to about 1/80 sec. Normally when I pull out the flashes I keep the shutter speed at 1/250 which is the sync speed of the flashes and it keeps everything quick and simple settings wise.

I put on my Canon 60mm 2.8f lens on after a few test shots with a stuffed animal in place of where my son was to sit I had played with my aperture and flash settings a little bit and had 2 compositions picked out in the same scene. One shot would be farther away with my son in only a portion of the frame and the background could be seen very well.

The other should would be more of a head shot of my son or a close up. The Christmas lights would then have a bokeh effect would look really nice. The one thing I wanted to try with him was to put a homemade bokeh filter over my lens and create a shaped bokeh. Well turns out when taking portraits of a 7 month old time is of the essence. I managed to get it to work during my test shots holding a filter in front of my lense.

If your wondering what bokeh and a bokeh filter is I will explain it quickly. Bokeh is an effect that happens to objects out of focus. When you have the subject of you photo in focus and the background is outside of your focal distance it creates a blurry background. This works really well to separate the subject of your photo from your background. When you have something brighter in the background like a light it creates this soft bright out of focus bulb like effect behind your subject. If you add a bokeh filter which all it is a cut out of a shape that is placed in front of you lense on something like black construction paper. The out of focus lights will then take the shape of what your cutout is in the filter.

Down side to creating a filter is that it introduced focusing issues with the camera I would have to manually focus on my subject them put the filter in front of the camera and then take the picture. Also less light makes in into the lens of the camera and it will drop your exposure a few stops.

I plan to try improving my process to integrate a bokeh filter. I tried to photo shop the bokeh in the test photo into a photo of my son but I could not get them to fit in well. So I plan to take what I learned from this experience and try to improve what it.