Bookeh shapes

Not to anyone's surprise there are two characteristics of the hole - shape and size.

Common advice is that cutout size has to be smaller then the real apperture - so for 50mm lens and f/2 it has to be smaller than 25mm

Cutting tiny shapes is not my thing (I'm not great at DIY) and the results were far from pleasing. In most cases edges were jagged and you could spot it in the final pictures.






And another example with skull and bones.



Even that I put a lot of effort to do it correctly you can see that it is not something I can be proud of.

I decided to go digital. I have used laser printer to print on transparent media (transparent foil used for presentations). I'm not sure if it is related to the toner or set-up of the printer, but the results were quite bleak.



I used permanent marker to blacken surrounding area.



The advantage of this method is that I can use extremely complex shapes.




The disadvantage is that foil is not crystal-clear and it adds soft focus effect (like pantyhose over lens). This is even worse when shape is complex and have some dark elements in the middle.



If the shape has a lot of empty space in the middle it gets slightly better.




Another test I did was based on the fact that cutout adds shape to the lights, but it can also add some color. I used the same foil, cut the shape of the heart (ok... shape of something vaguely similar to heart) and marked edges using red marker.



The effect:



It can be improved, but it suffice as proof of concept.

I have already planned some more tests:

• using laser cut shapes - it will take time as it require some preparation.
• using combination of color foils to get multi-color bokeh.

Have fun.