Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
One of the more popular posts here at DIYP is Create your own Bokeh. It shows you how to add hearts or stars (or skulls) shapes to your picture. I can totally understand it. It is a quick project, it’s fun and it takes nothing more than a piece of black paper and a puncher, or scissors.
I have to say, though, that making a few of those fun widgets takes time. It also eats space in the camera bag. If you are ready to take it to the next step, take a look at Ron Rademacher‘s Bokeh Shape-O-Mat.
One of the most popular posts here at DIYP is the Create Your Own Bokeh post – this is the one that teaches you how to make nice shapes in the blurred area of your image – AKA Bokeh.
It is a nice thing because, usually, those hotspots are just taking away from your subject attention, and if you apply this technique, those annoying hotspots can become part of your artistic say.
Creating your own bokeh shapes is easy and fun, however there are a few repeating questions that I frequently get by email and comments. This is why I was really happy to learn that manimal magic has done some great thinking and have solutions for all questions. Some of manimal magic’s wisdom was found in the comments of the original post, and some was taken (along with the images for this article) from his (really awesome) Flickr stream. I am going to format this as a Q&A thing, cuz it really feels like he’s answered all the hard questions.
Long while ago I published the Create Your Own Bokeh article which was one of the most fun articles this site has seen. I then followed up with some of the uses of this technique and DIYP Flickr pool had a fine hour with great and creative images that used this trick.
One of the questions that keeps popping us is “can you give some more details instructions on the process of making this this filter?”
Well, your prayers have been answered. Shannon Beauford created a complete guide on behind the scene of Creating Your Own Bokeh.
Little more than half a year ago, I published a guide to create your own bokeh. This guide provides a simple technique to shape the bokeh of the unfocused elements in your picture.
Here are the best 6 pictures that employed this technique, courtesy of DIYPhotography readers. I was glad to find creativity both in the shapes used (guess what? Hearts wins the jackpot) and the creativity using this technique.[Read More…]
Bokeh is an adaptation from a a Japanese word meaning blur. In photography this term is used to describe the quality of the areas in the picture which are not in focus.
When referring to Bokeh, we can distinguish some of it characteristics:
– Is the light/dark gradient smooth or sharp?
– What shape will a small dot of light take what it is in the Bokeh area? (mirror lenses for example, create a bagel like Bokeh)
We can play with those two variants to create a special Bokeh.
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