Janet Moon Photography

Wow- 2 tutorials back to back! Can you tell I’m having fun with my tree? My little 4 ft tree is getting a lot of exposure this week. Exposure, get it? Ha ha! Ok, awkward photographer humor.

Since I shared how to achieve pretty bokeh from your lights yesterday, I thought I’d also share how to achieve starbursts from your lights. For this effect, you have to make sure your aperture is small (big number). The smaller your aperture, the larger the actual bursts of light will be. You can see at f/22, the starburst shape is exaggerated much more than at f/4. The shutter has to be open for a very long time so it’s best to use a tripod. I was too lazy to grab the tripod so I placed my camera on some boxes on top of a chair and used the self timer. Make sure you don’t touch or bump the camera the entire time the shutter is open or your image will not be sharp. I took the image on the far right with a 30 second shutter speed. That is a very long exposure so be patient. Making art takes time!

This next lighting technique is a fun one! You can create any shape but for this example I used a heart. You need black/dark thick paper to create a lens hood to fit over your existing lens. I didn’t have any black paper so I used dark green scrapbook paper. I cut 1 circle the same size as my 50mm lens and then a rectangular strip which I taped to go around the lens. I cut a small heart in the center of the circle and haphazardly taped the 2 pieces together. Apparently I’m as good of a taper as I am putting christmas lights on a tree. The important thing is to make sure there is no light coming in from any side. Slip your creation onto your lens and choose your widest (smallest number) aperture, up your ISO, and lower your shutter speed (the lens hood blocks out a lot of light) and see the magic happen! You’ll probably need a tripod for this as well since the shutter speed is pretty slow. I showed these pictures to my 3 year old daughter and she kept pointing to the tree asking where all the hearts went!

Hope you have fun trying these techniques!

First off, sorry it’s been 9 months since my last photography tutorial! I will try to post more in 2013! With Christmas fast approaching, I thought I’d post a tutorial on how to achieve christmas tree bokeh (blur/balls of light). Here’s my trusty model, Mr. Snowman who has been joining our family for Christmas for the past 8 years. He always has a smile on his face and never complains that I take too many pictures. And no, the pictures aren’t distorted – we got a tiny tree this year and yes, I know the lights on the tree aren’t placed evenly. I can’t even blame the kids for that. It was all me.

In the trio of images above, I placed Mr. Snowman right in front of the tree. I used my 50mm 1.4 lens with just natural light in the house. You can see that the tree isn’t very blurry and the lights aren’t very noticeable at any of the apertures.

Here I moved Mr. Snowman about 3 feet in front of the tree and took the images with the same 3 settings. You can start to see the tree getting out of focus and the lights look like they’re glowing a bit more.

Finally, I moved my model about 5 feet in front of the tree. At each of the different apertures you can see the balls of light becoming more prominent. Remember, the wider the aperture, the bigger the orb. Now it’s time for you to practice with your slr! Your settings will be different depending on your environment and camera but hope these images showed you what distance and aperture can do for your christmas lights. Grab a model and create some distance between the tree and the model.  Choose the widest (smallest) aperture your lens allows and have fun!