DIYPhotography.net Photography and Studio Lighting

Interesting project - please feel free to add to www.photographyvoter.com

I wrote an article for the french forum "virusphoto" here : bokeh shape modification.
If any of you is french speaking or just want to see another way to achive that, feel free to browse to virusphoto.com ! (images are self-explanatory... ;))

It is really about bokeh. according to wikipedia, "Bokeh is a photographic term referring to out-of-focus areas in an image produced by a camera lens." "Vignetting is a reduction in image brightness in the image periphery compared to the image center." As this creative shade is affecting the shape of out-of-focus objects, it *does* affect the bokeh. Vignetting will probably also suffer from the shade, but that's a different story.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokeh
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vignetting

BTW, I'm not trying to promote flaming or discussion. After all, it's not important how it's called, what matters is how it looks

BeccaSue, which lens are you using ?
The lens must be a lagre aperture.

My heart was just a little too big in the other attempts. Yep, it's a bokeh shape... pretty nifty!

this is an awsome site. this one caught my eye, and i made one with a star. it is a very cool idea. i was wondering what the lights in the background are. i had success with christmas lights because they are small. thanks again for these cool tutorials

How did the photographer get the hearts so clear on the Rot picture? How do you get it so they are not over your subject? Also how do you get all the different colors? I've never done this before! But I want to try it!

i have tried this with black plastic folder cut out with a different shape:

Could you post the sizes you used?
It would be nice the bigger possible keeping the effect so you need less exposition time. I did it with a Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 (filter size 52mm) and I cut hearts 1.2mm tall.

This is definately Bokeh from everything I have ever read or learned about it.
Vignette is the darkened shadow around the very edges of an image, I get it on a couple of my lenses if I am lazy and leave on a couple too many filters.

Bokeh is the blur effect created by a shallow depth of field. Normally the blur would take on the round shape of the aperture when there are points of light in the background, like fairy lights for instance.
In the case of this little experiment, the circular nature of the aperture has been changed to a heart, creating heart shaped bokeh.

And now I will be heading out to try it. Seeing as there are so many christmas lights around this time of year.

OK, now most of you seem to have got it, try again but this time put several smaller shaped holes in the card over the front of the lens and you will get a number of heart-shaped 'lights' from each out of focus light.
But in-focus areas will still be sharp.
This was the principle of one of the famous German soft focus lenses used on large format cameras - Imogen, I think they were called.
This is because all 'in-focus' light rays come together at the point of focus but out-of-focus rays are spread out.

wow, I tried it with a simple star and it worked really well in my opinion :) thank you very much for the cool tip!

thanks, this was fun.

not a great image, but it works...

I tried it out and came up with (what I think is) a great shot:

Thanks -- a new trick in my bag o' tricks.

This is so creative and cool, thanks very much!!

I've recently learned this trick from a friend, and this is what came out

I am new to all of this, I really wanted a lensbaby as well, to see what sort of effects i could get. What do you need to set the exposure at to achieve this effect?

This is so wonderful! What a creative idea!

I can't figure out what I am doing wrong, I am getting the shaped lighting, but it I am also getting the whole frame masked, so I get a tiny image in the centre of the picture, the rest is black from the mask.
Any advice?
Are these images cropped?

Loved the effect, it was fun!

For those having trouble making it work...
I ran across this article a while back and tried it on my film SLRs and it worked great on all of them using several different lenses (wide-angle, normal, & tele). I used black poster-board with shapes punched using premanufactured "punches" sold at HobbyLobby, Michael's, etc. The shapes punched in the "lens hoods" were between 5mm and 10mm and they all worked on all the lenses I shot with; however I did notice that with the wide angle lenses I got a lot more dark masking similar to vignetting. Then I tried the same "lens hoods" on my sony 828 - FAILURE! What was a nice bokeh on my 35mm became bad vignetting - even when set to the same lens equivalent and aperture. Tried the shapes on a few P&S digital cameras, and again failure. Then I tried cutting much smaller shapes into the poster-board and tried on those same cameras, and SUCCESS! Borrowed a friend's 5D and the original shapes worked fine. Tried those shapes again on the Sony A100 and again SUCCESS!
From my limited tests some digital cameras use a very small internal aperture even though their 35mm equivalent size would indicate a much larger minimum aperture. From what I can tell if the shape you cut out is "small enough" (apparently at least 2/3 the ACTUAL aperture of the camera) you will get the nice bokeh effect seen throughout this post, but if the shape you cut out is too large, you will only see bad vignetting. So my vote is for both vignetting and bokeh depending on your workflow (- and the pictures posted so far are bokeh not vignetting caused by the "circle of confusion". Check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_of_confusion and http://snodart.com/tutorials.php for those who don't know what the "circle of confusion" is.)
Sorry for the long post, I hope this helps.

-Nathan

what mode do I use for this?

It really works and great! Thanks for the useful tips!

So, I have no clue, can this be done with your basic digital camera, or just a higher quality camera as shown?

I tried this effect tonight with my D80. My lens is an 18-135...I made the filter used a heart shaped hole puncher to punch a single heart in the middle. All my shots all blacked out completely except for the single heart shape (i used it in front of traffic lights so I'd have different colors). Do I need to move the taped ends of my bokeh so it meets the 50mm mark instead of all the way down to 18mm? Any suggestions?
I love this idea and can't wait to get it to work!

Wow! Perfect idea! Must try!!!!

Just wantedto know if this was possible to achevie on a Point and Shoot or if it can only be acheived on a DSLR. I have a Canon A630

Thanks

Just a quick thought. One of the things i noticed when buy a new lens recently was that the quality of Bokeh on more expensive lenses was highlighted by the smoother edges around "circles of confusion"

Could you simply create a "mask" of a circle to produce smoother circles? or am I simplifying the issue somewhat?

Adam

Hi, I'm sorry to shift things back to terminology, but I think the main effect you're getting from this is to reshape the aperture shadows / lens flare. Aperture shadows are created when you have sources of light that are out of focus, and they take on the shape of the aperture in the lens. In most SLR lenses, the aperture has between five and eight blades, hence the aperture shadows that look like a pentagon, hexagon or whatever, but with slightly curved sides. In this case, you're opening up the in-lens aperture as wide as it will go, and you're restricting the light with another aperture that has a different shape. Therefore, it casts a shadow with the other shape.

Check out the "Flare" entry on the following web page:
http://www.photographytips.com/page.cfm/2011

This page is also good:
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/lens-flare.htm

Generally, when people are talking about bokeh, they're referring to the way an out-of-focus background looks. Sometimes the out-of focus areas are better defined, and sometimes they're a mushy blur. To my knowledge, this is much more affected by the number of lens elements and their configuration, than the shape of the aperture. (When a Nikon 50 f/1.4 and a Nikon 50 f/1.8 are wide open, their apertures are pretty much perfect circles, but their bokeh looks very different. Even stopped down to the same aperture, their bokeh is different, though they both have seven diaphragm blades.) Given that bokeh is used to refer to out-of-focus areas in general, aperture shadows might be included in the category of bokeh, but if you're talking about the bright hearts, stars, or whatever created by out-of-focus light sources, I think many photographers would call these aperture shadows or lens flare. I'm not sure how the aperture shape would affect out-of-focus background elements that aren't bright light sources.

I appreciated what the gentleman said earlier about circles of confusion, but I think that has more to do with the physics phenomenon of diffraction, which usually applies when your aperture is small enough to approach the wavelength of the light. Pinhole cameras deal with this a lot. Here's a good article an diffraction and circles of confusion: http://www.earthboundlight.com/phototips/diffraction-small-apertures.htm...

By the way, great job to everyone who is experimenting and being creative with this technique. Having fun and being creative is what photography is all about!

i'm having trouble with this effect. i don't know what should be the size of the hole and stuff. wheneve i do this, i only get the frame.

This is a simple but nice effect, also easy to obtain.
tom