creating bokeh

In photography, bokeh is the blur, or the aesthetic quality of the blur,

 in out-of-focus areas of an image, or "the way the lens renders out-of-focus points of light. ...

Sometimes you will find images where the backgrounds look dreamy and out of focus

This is an image I took at a wedding and I'm going to show you how to achieve bokeh

when not shooting something you can actually focus on

 (like how i focused on the couple below)

in this photo the light off of the leaves is making them looks like cute little dots..

to achieve this while focusing on something its best to have a prime/fixed lens (one that doesn't zoom)

 for my camera I used a 50mm for this photo.

Here is a wall of twinkle lights at night

(xmas lights are the easiest ones to do this on!)

the photo below is when I use my autofocus..

don't get this confused with 'shooting in auto' this is just autofocus on my lens

this next photo is the exact same spot, just a few seconds later..

all I did was take my lens from auto focus to manual

adjust my lens ring to make the photo completely out of focus

and take the photo.. see the lights turned into cute little dots.

aka bokeh

Here is another one, side by side..

its hard to tell that its the exact same subject, but just by changing your focus

 you get two different photos.

Now I use a DSLR professional Canon 5d.

You can use a point & shoot camera for this too..

when you are about to take the photo and you push your shutter 1/2 way down to focus,

instead focus on something else first, hold it 1/2 down then when you face the lights and its out of focus

all you will need to do is finish taking the photo at the out of focus setting that your camera is at!

These are super fun to use as backgrounds for blog posts, cards, frames, etc..

here is one I used on my facebook wall last year with colored lights!

Have fun and remember there are no mistakes =)