Most people consider a blurry photo as a bad result. Actually, not always. Bokeh, for instance. It’s actually nothing more but a blurry photo. But, with the background of lights it can generate a beautiful abstract photo.

Bokeh is one of examples of photos with a shallow depth of field setting. Creating a bokeh photo isn’t that hard. You can even use a kit lens to create one. The keys of producing a bokeh photo are by widening your aperture (lower number) and choose the manual focus instead of auto. You need a light sources like street lamps, the lamps of vehicles at the highway or even a Christmas tree. That’s all. No additional equipment is required like creating a light trail photo which requires a tripod and remote shutter.

Create a DIY custom bokeh shapes

As I mentioned, creating a bokeh photo is extremely easy since no additional tool is required. All you need to do is set your camera with a wide aperture setting and manual focus. The rest, you just need to point your camera lens to the light source and rotate the focus ring and press the shutter button and boom!. You done.

After succeeding with your first bokeh you might want to make some improvisation with your bokeh project. That’s great!. What about creating a DIY filter for custom bokeh shapes?

You read it correctly. You can create a custom filter to produce a custom bokeh shapes like heart, star. Anything. Depend on your creativity. No complex materials are needed. All you need to create a custom bokeh filter is construction paper. You will also need scissor (of course) to cut the construction paper. Other tools you are going to need are X-Acto knife and cutting mat.

Once you prepared the tools and construction paper, you can watch the following video to get started.

So how? Interested to create a DIY filter for custom bokeh shape?