#HEART BOKEH FULL#

A longer focal length and/or faster lens will allow a larger cut-out to be used. Incidentally, if that's a 35mm f/2.8, the cut-out needs to be less than 35/2.8=12.5mm. It's easy to find out by simply looking at the live view as you bring the cut-out closer to the lens front - you want the point at which it stops vignetting. Shorter focal length lenses often use designs that don't place the entry pupil where we expect it, so the cut-out might need to be even smaller, or it might need to be closer to the front element of the lens than the filter threads. By the way, the larger the cut-out is without vignetting, the bigger each out-of-focus heart image will be in your photos, so you actually have some control over the size of the hearts too.īack to your 35mm SLR lens. so a 10mm cut-out would vignette! Basically, the lens would have to be open wider than f/5 to not vignette with the 10mm cut-out on your 50mm lens.

If you accidentally let your lens stop down to f/8, you'll get vignetting if the heart is larger than 50/8=6.25mm. That means the cut out portion of the heart would have to be narrower than 25mm or you'll get vignetting no matter what you do. Well, that means we'd expect the aperture_diameter to be about 50/2=25mm at the filter position. Yes, I said that right: too big a hole causes vignetting. If the hole is too big, you'll simply get vignetting. Thus, to form a new aperture, the disc you put at the filter position must have a hole in it that has a diameter smaller than the aperture_diameter calculated above. Most non-ultrawide lenses have designs in which, at the position the lens filter threads are at, the effective aperture diameter is approximately (usually not exactly):Īperture_diameter = focal_length / lens_f_number_set publishing scholarly research on this topic for several years now.įor this to work, the heart-cut-out must form the aperture - but that doesn't mean it must be inside the lens where the blades that normally form the aperture are.īasically, placement needed in front of the lens to form a new aperture depends on the optical design of lens. This is actually about shaping the OOF PSF (out-of-focus point spread function), and I happen to be an expert in measuring and manipulating OOF PSFs. Is there a way to get the desired image without Photoshop? Maybe a longer focal length maybe? I just have a Nikon D3100 with a 35mm lens. How would I achieve the above effect? Would I have to Photoshop two images together?

#HEART BOKEH FULL#

It looked like this but with full bodies and a street in focus: I saw a picture a long time ago on the internet of a couple standing in the street, fully in focus (whole body and street they were standing on), but the background had heart shaped lights. However, when I tried to include a subject, the bokeh didn't show as well. If you're capable of making an adequate lens tube (how are your woodworking or brass working skills?) you can get a pair of 200mm achromats, mount them a few mm apart facing outward from each other, and your stop holder goes right between. This was a long time ago, so you might have difficulty finding one.

There used to be an off-the-shelf Soligor lens that had both normal 'hole' Waterhouse stops and a variety of interesting shapes to provide exactly the effect you crave. Then you put your heart-shaped cutout on a card that fits in the stop holder. Waterhouse stops are cards that have aperture 'holes' in them, instead of using an adjustable 'iris' mechanism like more modern lenses. The way around this problem is to either find an old portrait lens that has 'Waterhouse stops' or build yourself something similar. At anyplace else, you get complex interactions that may be pleasing or may not, depending on the relationship of foreground and background, the design of the lens, and the phases of the moon. In order to control bokeh, you have to have your heart shaped aperture at the point inside the lens where the aperture blades already live. Here are some inspiring examples of the very best heart shaped bokeh images.So recently, I got a few of the bokeh shapes that you can put over your lens.Īs you are finding out, that really doesn't work. Hearts are one of the most popular choices because of their simple, elegant shape and the positive emotions we associate with them. You can get even more creative by using filters to shape your bokeh. It's a fascinating subject in its own right, making background lights look luscious and blur look beautiful. Bokeh is the quality of the blurry parts of your photos.

Heart bokeh