Bizzy Bokeh

BizzyBokeh, originally uploaded by nzcjs.

It's Christmas and I was quite pleased with my previous Christmas bokeh attempt. I wanted to try some different cutouts, so sent wifey off to the shops to get some nice black card and then raided my daughter's scrapbooking tools. I found a rather nice snowflake punch.

I used the Canon Photo5 bokeh hood as a template, then created a new cutout from my daughter's punch. The light is all wrong for doing the Christmas tree, but there was some nice light coming through the trees in the back yard. Desperate to try out my new hood I set off without tripod in an attempt to get a shot.

Auto-focus gets very confused with the hood over the lens and with the lens wide open focussing became a challenge ... especially as I was in an awkward position to get some nice highlights. Focus is on the rightmost flower, and as the depth of field is so shallow that's about the only thing that is vaguely focussed. The highlights haven't come out too bad though. Just waiting for it to go dark now then I can play with the lights on the tree.

I didn't post this for any other reason than to encourage whoever reads this to have a go with different shaped cutouts in a bokeh good.  Great fun and you can get some quite lovely effects.

Just for fun I took another bokeh image from the backyard and then had a bit of a play with hdr.  What do you think?