8.5 days

So today I'm going to do something a little different. I know we've been doing a count-down series, but it's good to shake things up every once in a while, right? I'm going to try my hand at a tutorial, which hopefully will lead me to a discussion about my equipment to help continue the countdown series. So really, this is just more of a detour.

This tutorial is on a technique that gets pretty popular around the holidays, and that's Bokeh lights. More simply put, it is taking relatively small point of light and blurring it to give it a very soft, romantic, almost magical quality.

The soft globes of light are the signature of the Bokeh effect

This technique gets popular around the holidays because Christmas tree lights make fantastic sources of pinpoint light to blur. I first learned of this technique from the fine people over at Digital Photography School and their great gallery and tutorial on Bokeh can be found here.

Bokeh lights are achieved by using a low f-stop when shooting the photo. F-stops, the units of measurement for aperture, control the depth of field for a photograph. This is essentially how much of the space in front of the camera will appear in focus. So, for example, say you're focusing your camera at a point exactly 10 ft from the plane of the film/sensor. F-stop, then, controls the +/- distance of what will appear in focus. So with a very wide aperture, say f1.8, the distance may only vary by 3 inches. This means only objects 9' 9" - 10' 3" away will be in focus. Compare that to a narrow aperture, maybe 16, when the variance may be one to several feet. The photo above was shot with an aperture of f1.8. Notice how the ornament is in focus, and part of the branch, but after only a few inches, the branch begins to leave focus, and the branches several inches behind the ornament are very much out of focus.

Building off that understanding, think about what would happen if you increase the distance between your subject and the lights.

The distance between the dog and the tree make the blurs seem larger

Even though this is the same tree with the same lights, the distance between my dog, Diogee, and the tree makes the lights blur more and seem compositionally larger than those in the ornament picture. This is because with the more distance between the lights and the subject, the further out of focus the lights will be. This means you can increase the size of the blur of the lights by increasing the amount of space between the subject and the light source.

You can also control the size and shape of the lights with your aperture setting, or by using a mask. There are some really cool examples of this on the DPS tutorial, and they do a much better job of explaining the somewhat more advanced technique of masking.

Depth of field manipulation isn't just limited to Bokeh lighting effects, nor are those effects limited to the holiday season. Depth of field is used as an artistic tool to direct the viewers attention to certain parts of the image. It can also be used to suggest endless repetition of a design pattern, suggesting the countless iterations just blur off into infinity.

The Christmas luminaries outside our home seem to go on forever

Bokeh light effects can also be achieved with much larger lights than just Christmas lights. In the previous photo, the street lights began to see this effect. In the next photo, lamps along a trail near my college have the same effect, which not only draws your attention to the lit path in the foreground, yet pull the path off into the infinite dark, only dotting the horizon along the way.

Another example of Bokeh effect with larger lights

The use of this neat and softening effect are only limited by your imagination and time to tinker. It often gives photos a soft, etherial effect, making the image seem almost mystical. Let me know what you thought of my first tutorial, and feel free to send in any examples you've taken of Bokeh photography. Next post will be about my equipment and how I use it to make these images.