Club Scrap Aspen Blog Hop - In camera Bokeh

Hello everyone

I do hope that you all had an absolutely wonderful Christmas and that Santa Clause brought you all lots of wonderful things.

It was awesome to follow the countdown to Christmas via the Club Scrap daily blog and even to win one of the amazing prizes that were given away on a daily basis.

Anyway, just before Christmas Kay posted about Bokeh in the blog so I thought I would give you all a very quick overview of bokeh in camera and in photoshop.  So here goes:

Bokeh is an adaptation from a Japanese word meaning blur.  In photography it is used to describe the quality of the photos which are not in focus.

In order to create in camera bokeh you will need a wide aperture lens for your dslr - 50mm F 1.8 is typically what I would use on my Canon camera and I am sure that there is an equivalent for those of you who shoot Nikon. You also need a sheet of black card stock.

In effect what you are going to do is create a lens hood.  Cut a circle out from the black card stock and use a small punch to make a shape in the middle of the cut out disc.  The disc must cover the end of the lens completely.

You need to make sure that the entire end of the lens is covered as shown above.

Then set the camera to its lowest aperture value (wide open) and make your shots.

Here is an example:

And that is it!  Easy as pie.

Here is a small tutorial on how to make a bokeh background paper:

First create a new transparent file.  The use a brush at 100 % opacity to stamp randomly over the background.  Do this a couple more times and you will end up with several layers with the stamp applied in random places and also you can randomise the opacities of each layer you work with.

You can see here that I have applied a 20 gaussian blue to the yellow layer.

Here the blue layer also has a gaussian blur of 20 pixels.

Here is a layout completed!

Enjoy and have a wonderful and prosperous new year.

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http://clubscrapcreates.blogspot.com/