A Little Photo Experiment

Over the weekend, I decided to experiment with my camera a bit. I've seen this method referred to as bokeh, but I've also read some quite extensive threads as to why it shouldn't be called bokeh. So, for the time being, I'm going to call it experimenting with my camera... because who really cares? All that matters is that you're being creative!

I was going to make another (prettier) lens cover to show you all because at first I thought this one was a bit ridiculous. Then I realized, this is exactly what I want to show you. This taped up disaster proves that the creative process can be a bit messy and frustrating at times but it's always worth the trouble. 

I used thick cardstock to form a tube and made sure that it fit snugly around the lens. I then cut a heart shape out of a circular piece of cardstock and taped it to the front. The first heart I cut was way too big. As you can see, I fixed that problem by cutting another circular piece with a much smaller heart. This small heart worked much better. I tested my lens cover on some Christmas lights. I set my focus to manual and made sure it was nice and blurry. I then played around with the aperture a bit and held the shutter open for a good amount of time to let a lot of light in. Here's what I captured...

The Christmas lights on my house are pretty simple, so the hearts came out nice and clean...

My neighbors have a much bigger display. Their lights are also a bit more fluorescent...

My other neighbors have the single colored strand/icicle light combo. At first I thought this looked too messy but it kind of grew on me...

Last but not least, I had to test it out on my pink tree!

I'll definitely be working with this technique more in the future.