Žan Kafol Aerial & cave photographer SL
Journal

Photo story

Bokeh in Different Shapes

PortraitsMiscellaneous

While browsing an online shop for lenses, I came across a special one.

The golden, shiny and beautiful (sarcasm) brass lens Petzval 58 Bokeh Control, offers different shapes of blurred background (bokeh, in Slovenian) and seemed too expensive for this kind of experimentation.

So I looked into how it works.

Near the mount it has a slot for the supplied plates, which have holes cut into different shapes. One plate has a heart-shaped hole, another a star, and so on.

Because it seemed that I could achieve the same effect with any other lens, I cut an approximately 2 cm heart-shaped hole out of cardboard and covered the 50mm f/1.4 lens with it, so that the only light reaching the sensor came through that hole.

After a few attempts, I achieved satisfactory results with decorative lights. Cutting with scissors is not especially precise and every imperfection shows, so I have already asked a colleague to cut a few plates for me with a CNC machine. Results to follow...

Colourful heart-shaped bokeh lights float in clusters against a completely black background.
A black dog's profile is outlined against warm heart-shaped points of light in the dark background.
Close portrait of a black-and-white dog, with colourful heart-shaped bokeh lights glowing behind its face.
A dark dog sits in profile beneath rows of glowing heart-shaped bokeh lights reflected on a wooden background.
Multicoloured musical-note shapes float as deliberately formed bokeh against a nearly black background.

Behind the scenes...

Wide behind-the-scenes collage showing portrait faces, a camera setup and a dog during an experiment with shaped bokeh.
Wooden aperture discs with star, snowflake, crescent and hand shapes lie beside a camera lens.