MAKE HEART-SHAPED BOKEH

Mike Harris shows you how to transform bokeh into almost any shape you like using a homemade aperture disc

- Mike Harris

1 HOUR Bokeh derives from the Japanese word ‘boke’, which means blur, and it’s used to describe the quality of the out-of-focus specular highlights you see time and time again in images, such as portraits or still lifes.

Bokeh is often achieved by focusing on a subject that’s separated from a concentrated light source (like a string of LED lights). By shooting at a wide aperture to create a shallow depth of field, the lights in the background are rendered as attractive glowing shapes. Narrower apertures are still capable of capturing bokeh, but the super-wide apertures of fast lenses are known for producing the creamy depths of field that create these attractive specs of blur most effectively.

Not all bokeh is the same shape, though. You may notice images with spherical, hexagonal, or even pentagonal forms of bokeh. The shape is determined by a number of factors, including the number of aperture blades in a lens, the shape of those aperture blades, and the aperture being used, and it’s therefore possible to manipulate bokeh shapes by introducing a whole new aperture.

In this tutorial we’ll show you how to make an aperture disc that will sit on the front element of your lens, and transform the bokeh you capture. We created a simple love heart, but you can use almost any shape you like – all you need is some thick black paper and a few craft utensils.