If It Ain't Bokeh, Don't Fix It!

I have seen a lot of people playing with Bokeh on their cameras- such a fun thing to do with Christmas Lights!!

Now you may be wondering what bokeh is- I thought the same thing. The effect looks like this:

Via Honey We're Home

I thought it might be fun to play with this effect with my Christmas tree too...buuut I decided to steal the idea of this picture I pinned!

Via

How fun is that? To start out with, I taped two pieces of cardstock together so that the paper would not show light through. I then stenciled out my tree. I really didn't know what size to make it. I think I should have made it a bit bigger because it blocked out a bit too much of the photos I took.

I then cut it out, but I was too lazy to attach it to my lens (I didn't want to tape it) so I held it on tightly with my hand.

I then attached my best lens for these types of shots- my 35mm. I think a 50mm works best, but I don't have one of those. I set my lens focus to manual and then I stood as far back from my tree as I could (#smallcondoproblems). I focused in on something close to me so that the tree would be in the background (not the focal point). But since I was on manual focus mode I did not have to have that object in the foreground and I tried to capture my tree.

Make sure you are on the lowest aperture value (I was using F1.8) and snap away!

Now I was just kind of playing around and I didn't get any shots I looooved (I blame small condo and the fact that my 35mm doesn't do great room shots!!) but here is what I did get- it actually worked pretty well!