Christmas Lights & Bokeh #Photography

Christmas lights are truly beautiful, and I knew this year I would take the opportunity to try my hand at capturing beautiful holiday bokeh lights for the first time. We don’t have a tree up in our temporary dwelling (we surely will have a Christmas tree next year in our new home) but we visited family that did, and I stole a moment to take some shots in front of their tree.

How To Create Bokeh and Spectral Lights

Bokeh is derived from a Japanese word meaning blur or haze. Shooting with a dSLR camera in manual allows us to focus on an object and create artistic blurring for everything around it that isn’t significant to the main subject of the photo, by using a large aperture (such as 1.8 or 2.2) and distance.

So how do you capture these dreamy balls of out of focus lights?

1. Position your subject where you’d like it to stand in front of your lights and spot meter off your subject, because you want it to be correctly exposed and visible (otherwise you will get a silhouette). Your background lights will blow out, and that is what we want.

2. Make sure your subject is far enough from the light source that it creates blur. If it’s too close, the background will be too in focus, and you’ll capture less of those beautiful blurry light balls. I positioned the flowers about six feet away from the tree.

3. Use a large aperture. I used ƒ/1.8, which kept some of the items on the table a bit more in focus, but everything in the background blurry. If I wanted a shot with less in focus (just the flowers and not the candles) I would have moved closer to the table, narrowing the depth of field. This wasn’t important to me here, but if it is to you, make a note that the closer you are to a subject, the narrower the focal plane, and moving away from the subject widens the focal plane.

4. Snap away!

You can capture this effect with any lights, such as those from a bridge, a city skyline, distant street lamps, etc but the enormous amount of beautiful lights around Christmas time (and the accessibility of it in your home) make it an ideal time to try this out and have fun. Happy snapping and Happy New Year!