Heart-shaped bokeh is a popular photography trick for Valentine's Day or any time you need to show a little extra love in your snap shots. All you want is 5 mins and a few fundamental supplies, and you may be shooting coronary heart-shaped bokeh.
Supplies for Heart-Shaped Bokeh
You could always buy a shaped-bokeh kit, but why bother when you likely already have all the supplies to make your own?As pictured, all you want are
- A piece of black paper (thicker cardstock works best)
- A rubber band
- A piece of tape
- Scissors
- A 50mm lens
You can get more cunning and use an x-acto knife for making the certainly small cuts, however a sharp scissors works nicely for reducing each facets of the heart immediately. You may want to even use a heart-fashioned hole punch, in case you appear to have one.
Now, start your timer for 5 minutes, and by way of the stop of it you must easily have been capable of
- Cut a bit of black cardstock an inch or so thick and lengthy enough to wrap around your 50 mm lens. Roll it around the lens and tape it collectively.
- Trace around your 50 mm lens to make a circle. Cut it out, leaving a half of inch or so all of the manner around. Cut notches from the outside into the traced circle, which you may later bend to steady the circle onto the front of the lens.
- Fold the circle in 1/2 and re-open at least two times to discover the precise center. Trace your coronary heart or be courageous and bypass right to slicing it out. For an introductory 50mm kit lens, you could make your form up approximately 17 mm long. (Here's the thing on the math at the back of that, if you are curious.)
And, it's it. Place the roll over your 50 mm lens, keep the circle with the heart in the front of your lens, and use the rubber band to stable the folded flaps across the outdoor of the roll. Now you need to discover your self a bokeh source, installation your challenge, and start shooting.
Setting Up and Photographing Shaped Bokeh
If you need a little more background on bokeh, you may want to click on and read the posts All about Bokeh and Shaped Bokeh for more details and examples of bokeh and how to.
You will want a factor light source to create the bokeh and develop into the coronary heart shapes: a string of lighting works well. I endorse the usage of a dark history, if viable, to dangle the lights. You can use a wall or a darkish set of curtains if you do now not have a backdrop. (The trouble with a lighter-colored backdrop is that you will turn out to be seeing the wires between the lighting fixtures, rather than just the lighting themselves.)
Consider using a tripod for your camera. You will be shooting at the widest aperture you can (f/1.8 or faster, hopefully, if you are using a 50 mm f/1.8 lens for example), but putting the heart shape in front of the lens will cut down on the amount of light reaching the sensor and require a longer shutter speed. Shoot in manual or aperture priority, set the aperture to f/1.8 or faster, and work from there. Consider using a flash if you want to illuminate only the subject and leave the background darker. Use a remote or 2-second countdown timer to avoid camera shake on the tripod.
You need to get your challenge as near the digital camera as feasible, while preserving the heritage and lights as a minimum twice as some distance away. The closer-within the digicam can cognizance, the bigger the very last bokeh hearts can be. You can also need to test a bit to find the great locations to your given challenge.
Summary: Heart-Shaped Bokeh Photography
Now you are ready to shoot your own heart-shaped bokeh in five minutes or less. You could create an image for your own Valentine's Day cards or just for fun. You can apply the same ideas to creating other shapes, as well.What will you create? Share a link or picture in the comments below!
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This post is also linked to Do Tell Tuesday,One Project at a Time, and What I Learned Wednesday.
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