{Photography} How to Create Heart Shaped Bokeh with Christmas Lights

Last night the kids and I were playing in the living room.

All the lights were off, except for the Christmas Tree.

We danced, they climbed, I tickled, we all giggled.

I saw an awesome tutorial on Pinterest, about how to get beams of light to come off of your twinkle lights.  I thought I pinned it, but I can't find it anywhere. I wanted to give proper credit, but alas, I can't. Pinning FAIL.  There are a bunch of tutorials HERE, containing the same concept for the tree shots I got toward the end of the post.

For the heart shaped bokeh, I did my own thing. 

 I AM NOT A PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHER.

I tinker, so that I can learn.

There is an article linked to THIS PIN, but I didn't read it, so I don't know how they did it.

I know how I did it...

1 3x3 square of white paper with a small heart cut in the center.  

I did four different versions until I finally found the one the worked for me.  The first one I did was too big and made all of my twinkle lights look like Pac Man:)

I used my tripod so that everything was more stable.

I worked in Manual Mode

Aperture or F-stop set to f22 

Shutter Speed set to 25

ISO set to 1600

I took the camera off of auto focus (AF) and switched to Manual Focus for more control.

After taking different shots, I stayed in these camera settings and put Auto Focus back on for the tree shots below.

It was fun to tinker and test this concept... and to have it actually work:)

Pretty much the only editing I did to the shots was to airbrush the ISO pixilation out, and brighten it up from the airbrushing.  I love how all of them turned out.

This bokeh shot taken without the heart filter on.