Bokeh Portrait

Christmas Eve gave me a chance to try out, once again, the bokeh-shaping kit that I received a week earlier after an impulse $25 internet purchase.  I hadn’t had success in taking a portrait with it on my first attempt during the previous Friday afternoon’s wedding, so was keen to see how practical it would be to use it to form distinctive backdrops for portraits.  My nephew Matthew was happy to stand in as a model for this test shot.

The background here is the christmas tree in my parent’s house, and Matthew is about 8 feet from the tree, and about 6 feet from the camera.  These distances were some of the things I wanted to get a feel for, because the kit requires me to use a 50mm lens, which requires some distance between the camera and the subject to avoid overly-tight framing, and even though it requires me to use a wide aperture (f/1.8 preferably) to give shallow depth of field, it still requires a fair bit of distance between the subject and the background to ensure the light sources are thrown completely out of focus, to create the bokeh that the kit shapes.

There were probably more relevant shapes in the kit that I could have used for this shot of Matthew, but I hadn’t brought the full kit with me to Murragh for our Christmas Eve visit – just the heart-shaped one that was still on the 50mm lens that I had been playing with a week earlier.

The lighting here is as it was for my previous post – an SB-800 bare and bounced off the ceiling.  The ceiling in question is of a hall way off the area where the christmas tree is – the ceiling over the christmas tree is much higher as it’s next to the stairs – and so while Matthew is lit by the bounced light, the christmas tree isn’t.  That allows it to stay dark, and I ensure that little ambient light comes through (apart from the fairy lights of course) by keeping the shutter speed at 1/250s, the maximum which the camera can shoot at while using flash.

In reality Matthew is underexposed here, and in particular his eyes could do with some fill flash, but as a test shot to give me an idea of at least one set of camera-to-subject and subject-to-backgroud distances that works, it was a success.