Creative Bokeh

Creating Bokeh in front of your subject.

Though I will never give up my claim that all the wide open Bokeh effects that everybody is in love with these days in anything but a fad like Selective Coloring and the Lomo Instagram effects, it still is pretty cool and is perfect for creating some great effects.  For yesterdays shoot, I mixed both Strobes and Christmas lights to create these effects.  First off I put a Paul C Buff Alien Bee AB800 about 10ft from my model with a shoot through umbrella.  I put a gridded AB800 behind her with the standard reflector can that comes with them with a 30 degree grid to control any spill of light.  I hung about 400 christmas light behind the model about 15 ft behind her.  The unique color bubbles come from me hanging a strand of colored christmas lights in front on my camera about 1 ft in and 10 ft in front of the model.  The Colored lights were outside the focal plain of the lens and created some unique bokeh effects that make these shots stand out from the typical Christmas Light Bokeh shot.  The strobes were both set to min power, I shot at ISO 250 at 1/60th to 1/100th of a second and bounced between f2.8 and f4.0 on my lens.  When doing this kind of shoot, experiment with different lenses because the number of blades in the lens will create different shaped bokeh effects.    And make sure you have the ability to turn off the lights as normal overhead lights in the room will often  be to powerful for that slow a shutter speed/ISO and will give the shots a ton of Light pollution not to mention overpower your Christmas lights.  

The photos with the round Bokeh were done with the Nikon 70-200 2.8 VII while the shots with the Octagon Bokeh were shot with a Nikon 85mm 1.8D.

Overhead view of the Setup.