Speaking of winter. This Christmas I was in Tennessee, and it snowed. I took my camera outside to take some pictures, and quickly noticed these cute little black triangles encroaching on every one of my pictures.

uhhh.

Fast like a fox I put the camera back inside, feverishly googled the symptoms, and found…nothing. Turns out the solution was: waiting three days. I dunno, but it’s gone now. Just as quick as it came.

Cute little black triangles at 24mm:

Cute little black triangles, almost gone at 35mm:

Today, my camera is well again, thank you.

Once you get really close, you’ll probably need to turn off the autofocus and do it all manually. And a note on all the below shots: since I was shooting inside and using ambient (not flash) light, I had really slow shutter speeds. Too slow to handhold, so I had to use a tripod and shutter release cable.

Neither are something I use often, but when I do, they’re definitely worth the money.

First shot: Simple nativity scene. This was super easy. I loosened the screw of the lamp shade so I could tilt it, then used gaffer tape to hold it in place and create some soft, directional light.
By the end of the night, pretty much everything in Kristin’s apartment had been gaffer-taped in one form or another. Stuff’s like magic.

f/2.8, 1/125, 70mm, ISO 1600

Poinsettias are a classic Christmas decorations, but I’m not a fan of them myself. So, doing the macro that I was, I went in very tight. Got all biology-class on it.

What really helped me the most was back lighting it; that let all the details shine through. I broke off a leaf and taped it on the top of the lamp (a different one), but it kept slowly sagging forward, making focusing with a super-shallow depth of field very hard. I needed something something small, thin, and light to attach to the lamp to hold up the top. All I could find were bobby pins, so I gaffer tapped them together to make a little gaffer-tape stick. I used that to support the top of the leaf. Bam.

The last thing was the different shaped bokeh (pronounced “bo-ka”, means background blur).
I wanted to use the Christmas tree because it’s Christmastime, and it has a lot of little lights that are perfect for this.

First step, get the right size bokeh. You do this by controlling your depth of field (trial and error for me).  Once I found what I liked, I needed a foreground focus point. I used bird-shaped salt and pepper shakers. To get them into the frame, I stacked a planter pot on top of a small end table on top of a chair. Dr. Seuss would have been proud.

Somewhere in there I balanced (not being figurative) a lamp for directional light.

But the light was still a little harsh, giving some hard reflections. To fix this, I opened up a paper napkin and taped it to the side of the lamp. It was translucent so the light passed through, but it did the job and diffused it nice and smooth.

Another reason I used a light on the birds was to separate them from the background. You can see the difference in the below two shots.

After everything was set-up, we were ready to change the shape of the bokeh. This was very simple, and I’m still surprised it worked so well. With camera on tripod, we (Kristin) cut a circle of black paper and cut out a shape in the center. The first one was with a shape-punch-thingy. About half an inch wide. After that we (she) did them by hand, keeping the same size.

Just taped that on to the front of my lens, bumped up my exposure by two or three stops, and started snapping away.

Played around with different shapes, did a little post-processing in Aperture 3.

In the below images, my exposure was f/2.8, 1/13, 200mm, ISO 4000

One last note on changing your bokeh. I found that despite my aperture, a shutter of less than 1/10 in ambient light seemed to muddy the shape. As a result I had to bump my ISO way up.

Hope this was helpful. And as you can see, all really easy!

Joe!!

Alas, I’m diverting the rest of this post to Katie’s blog.

At one point I did pick up Katie’s camera and take a picture of the rain.

The rain:

took pictures of

flags.

…

and of Sal and Katie

and Carole.

click to see it bigger.

we met miniature mariachis. they played us a song that became a rap.

This gun doesn’t recoil this much, I was just doing a left-hander so I could hold my camera with the right.  I didn’t hit anywhere near my target: