How to create a Bokeh with Manual Settings (DSLR)

I kinda like the fad of Bokeh that's all over right now. "In photography, Bokeh is the blur, or the aesthetic quality of the blur, in out-of-focus areas of an image. Bokeh has been defined as 'the way the lens renders out-of-focus points of light.'" We have all seen on Pinterest the cardboard cutout cover for your DSLR that creates a Bokeh effect, however cool this technique is for creating crazy shapes with lighting, I really wanted to try this technique using my manual settings on my Sony DSLR for my Christmas tree this year.

Roberts Donovan had a really nice tutorial on how to create this look, and he also gives you some great tips on using your DSLR as well. Unfortunately his tutorial was for a more sophisticated camera than the one we have.  Our lens' don't have a large aperture, so it wasn't as easy as I hoped it would be to create this look. Realizing quickly that the more I zoomed in the smaller my aperture was getting. So I took his advice and stepped away from my tree realizing that I could just crop my image to get my desired effect. Noting to myself to put on my Christmas list for next year a macro lens with a large aperture range!

So as I clicked away and played with my settings I eventually got a couple of shots that looked like this:

I love how our angel tree topper looks like an evil owl sitting on top of our tree. That amused me. Roberts Donovan had a good little to do list in order to to get the shot, with a couple of modifications to be able to use my own camera

1. Set your camera to Aperture Priority mode (A or Av on the program dial). (Mine was A)
2. Select the smallest possible aperture (f) number for your lens (should be ≤f/4). The smallest my lens would go was f/3.5, but I had to be zoomed completely out to achieve that so I was able to zoom in to an f/4 to achieve the look
3. Switch your camera to manual focus and manually adjust the focus to the closest setting. (The blurriest you can make it will create a soft effect!)
4. Zoom your lens to somewhere around 50mm. (Again, to get the largest aperture I was zoomed in about 20mm)
5. Find some nice points of light at a distance of 10′ or greater from the camera (your Christmas tree is the perfect subject this time of year). (I used our tree obviously, but I was about 6-8 feet away sitting in my wing chair.)
6. Fire away!

If you get a shutter speed that’s too slow (ie: less than 1/30 second), try bumping the ISO up to 400 or more. (My exposure time was 1/6 of a second and exposure compensation was -2. I'm not sure whether or not I adjusted my ISO on this shot or not. If I did I can't remember what it was set at.)

Next step for me was to crop the bad boy so you can really see the blurry effect of all those wonderful white led lights. If you have the lovely Instagram and Vintique app (iPhone) then you can play with filters and colors to create the below cropped image! I had fun and learned some new tricks for my camera!