Heart Shaped Bokeh - the making of this photo (Patreon)

I posted this photo of Jessica on Flickr and was asked, "And how did you achieve the heart-shaped bokeh?" So this piece is about how that was done, as well as some other considerations that went in to making this picture.

For starters - the hearts were done in camera, this is not a filter, and it was not done in Photoshop.

Shaped bokeh is actually pretty easy to achieve. It seemed to be quite popular about 5-10 years ago, and was used in photos, movies, and music videos. But I don't recall seeing much of it recently.

There are hundreds of articles and YouTube videos describing how to do it, but it boils down to this: cut out a shape from a piece of card, put it right on the front of your lens, shoot with a shallow depth of field, and the out of focus parts of the image will take on the shape you cut out. It is important to use a wide aperture to get the best effect (this was shot at f/1.8). Also, this effect works best when the background consists of points of light - an evenly lit background will still be out of focus, but you won't see the shapes.

To make it simple, I purchased a "Bokeh Masters Kit" off eBay:

This kit is still available (link on the packet), but is only good if you have a lens with filter size of 52mm. It is easy enough to cut shapes out of cardboard, which I have done for my larger lenses.

The heart shape in it's mount looks like this:

So when you cut a shape out of cardboard, don't forget to leave tabs to mount it on the lens. Mounting is done with a rubber band, like this:

And there you have it - heart shaped bokeh!

Lighting

Now, some lighting considerations... This shoot was done in Jessica's bedroom. The heart shaped lights are, of course, outside her window, and not very bright in the room. To expose those correctly, I needed a 1/2 second exposure, even at f/1.8 - take into account the card in front of the lens is blocking a lot of light.

Jessica is lit by flash, which is only on for 1/1000th of a second, so she does not have to remain motionless for half a second. But, to make sure the only light that is on Jessica is the flash, we had to make sure her room was totally dark. This made giving direction interesting (I could not see her clearly), but Jessica was talented and experienced, so knew good poses without much help from me.

The other thing I could not see was the reflection of the scene in the window, leading to me appearing in early attempts of this shot:

Final Thoughts

This is a fun and easy technique that can add some interest to photos. Once released from lockdown I am going to use it in a shoot. Of course, the shape can be anything. I saw a film where square bokeh was used throughout to enhance the dark mood (wish I could remember what it was) which inspired me to do this shoot with Amy:

I hope you enjoyed reading this and will subscribe to my Patreon