This is real bokeh. Got the idea from John Hedgecoe's 30 year old book, cut out a star on black paper and stuck it in front of the lens resulting in the bokeh taking on the shape of the paper's hole. Light in background are from cristmas lights from my cristmas tree. That ugly bastard is actually me, my friend who had agreed to model couldn't make it on deadline day so I did it myself.
Camera on tripod, my face in front and lights hung from the ceiling some distance from the lens. Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 lens with the home-made star "filter". Trial-and-error done with my new cable release.
Post processing: Neat image, crop, resize, desaturate, sharpen, cloned out a corner of a star on the top, and burned the shadows in background to make it black.
Statistics
Place: 240 out of 241 Avg (all users): 3.7500 Avg (commenters): 3.3333 Avg (participants): 3.4083 Avg (non-participants): 4.1296 Views since voting: 940 Views during voting: 341 Votes: 228 Comments: 10 Favorites: 0
I'm sorry to say I don't particularly care for this photo. Interesting idea, but I think the stars need to be much smaller and more artfully arranged for it to work. And they need to either be sharp or very soft. The paper burrs from your filter show up plainly here, and are distracting.
(A variation might be to photograph the eyes from the front, with some star-shaped lights reflected in them.)
You've probably already figured out from the other comments that your method (and thus the fact that this was real bokeh) wasn't apparent from viewing the photo. I don't think there is much that can be done about that...
Here's the way I see it; "bokeh", technically, is an out-of-focus artefact created by spherical lens distortions. Artistically, it's a concept of interplay between out-of-focus and sharp-focus elements in a composition.
For me, your image does not meet the terms of the challenge especially well, because everything in it is realtively sharp, and there's no subject/ground interaction at all.
Add photograph to your favorites
Add photographer to your favorites
Photographer found comment helpful.
