Bokeh Practice With A Cat

My 11 year old cat was helping me practice bokeh shots this morning -- I think the lights would have been better if they were higher up (behind him, rather than so many on the floor) - but I was having a hard time getting the lighting set up. Also -- originally, I was trying to get a shaped light bokeh using a home made bokeh filter featuring a heart. But no matter what I did, I couldn't get the hearts to show up as nicely as the plain light balls did. When trying to get the cat with the hearts, I also had a hard time figuring out lighting... I guess I'll have to practice more -- but at least I think I have basic bokeh started....

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Nice effort. My cat wouldn't have had the patience to stay very long!

I find that bokeh filters over your lens need quite a hard light source for them to be really effective and the filter pattern itself needs to be probably smaller than you think.

For example, when I shot this the first bokeh filter I made was too big which produced fuzzier stars. I had to make a much smaller one. (Still not perfect but I ran out of time!)

Oh wow! Thats a neat shot! Thanks for sharing that Mike! How hard a light source is required? I read that it can be done with Christmas lights (though mine are mini ones at the moment)... or a candle even??

Yes, Christmas lights work a treat. I think my statement of hard light is not quite right but small clean light sources work best which is why xmas lights are good.

Either the cat is really patience or really lazy... lol

I like it but would suggest toning down the bright bokeh spots.