Today I had some time to take photos while the smaller kids were sleeping. This is a gingerbread house that the kids got to decorate exactly how they wanted.

For tech geeks:

I have been thinking to try out different shaped bokeh thingies for agies, but never gotten to it. This week I decided to do it, as I saw some amazing shots from a neighbor where he was using the technique.

The bokeh shapes are created by a piece of cardboard in front of the lens with a shape cut out from it. The first step was to decide which lens to use and to calculate the correct size for the shape. For the 85/1.8 lens, the shape could be a maximum of ~47mm diameter. I decided to try it out with the traditional heart shape. I cut out a circular piece of black cardboard that would fit into the filter thread of the lens. In the middle I cut out the heart shape. As this was my first try, I thought to do it quick and dirty just to get the feel for it. Below is the piece of cardboard.

The next thing was to figure out what to shoot with it. I decided to use a well worn out idea of “heart smoke” out of a chimney. Fortunately Jenny and the kids had baked a gingerbread house for Christmas. I placed the house on a chair in the middle of our living room and taped some red led lights on the wall. We use these lights on our bikes. As you can see from the picture the intensity of the lights varies quite a lot. This can be seen also in the actual gingerbread house picture. The lowest heart is so bright that it doesn’t seem to be red anymore.

The lights have double leds. I assumed that this would not be that clearly visible in the photos, but it shows pretty clearly as double hearts.

I used one speedlight with a half blue gel to give the wall a blueish sky-like look. Another speedlight was used to give the house a sunset like hard but warm light. This speedlight had a full CTO gel infront. Both speedlights were used at 1/64 power because I was using 1.8 aperture to gain maximum bokeh. Below is a setup photo.