Shutterbug Sunday: I Heart Bokeh & GIVEAWAY

As I discussed in my last Shutterbug Sunday post, I love bokeh...gorgeous blurry, round, magical bokeh. This week, I wanted to show your something different, my attempts at heart-shaped bokeh.

First, I scoured the house looking for black construction paper and finally came up with a piece of brown paper. Close enough, I was in business! Using the small end of the lens hood from my 35mm 1.8, I traced a circle on the paper and cut a heart in the exact center with my husband's pocket knife. With all fingers still intact, I trimmed the circle a bit with a pair of scissors and taped it to the inside of the hood with some blue painter's tape.

With my family laughing at me for making my D90 look like a school craft project, I headed out in search of bokeh producing light. I shot the sunshine streaming through my bouganvillea arbor. I skulked around the neighborhood after dark capturing headlights, street lights, and signal lights. I punched holes in a piece of cardboard and captured the perfect heart-shaped dots that appeared when I placed it in front of a window. I even dug in the attic for our white Christmas lights and added them to our garden hedges to make more defined hearts that you see in photo above. Our neighborhood lawn crew must think that I have lost my mind.

A few tips:

Use a lens with the largest aperature possible (f1.4, 1.8, 2.0) and make sure the heart is exactly in the center of the circle.  Due to the large amount of the lens covered, I found that I had to adjust the shutter speed to a slightly slower speed to allow in additional light and I set my ISO to 100 to prevent grain.

Get out and try it, experiment with other shapes, and link-up your own photos to the Linky tool that I have provided.  As an added incentive, I am giving away a set of 5 greeting cards from my print collection to one person that links up by November 27th at Midnight.

I invite you to visit my blog, bliss and folly, to see more examples.
Until next time. Stay sweet. ♥ tammy lee