Holiday Photo Tutorial

A few years ago I stumbled upon what I like to call "holiday bokeh".  Bokeh is the photography term that describes the blurry background in a picture.  It looks like this:

See that blur of Christmas lights in the background?  That's holiday bokeh.  Holiday bokeh (or any blurry background, for that matter) is achieved when you get the camera as close is as reasonable to the subject in focus and put the background at a distance.  In other words, if I had backed this gingerbread house up to the tree, the lights wouldn't have been blurry.  No holiday bokeh.  Also, you need to set your aperture as low as possible (that number will look like a 1.4 or 2.8 or 3.6, etc).

Ever since I discovered holiday bokeh, I've had it on my to-do list to take holiday photos of my kids with a background of Christmas lights.  I finally did it this weekend!  I just taped Christmas lights up to my wall, layed down a white sheet, and put my kids about 6 feet in front of the wall.  Here's how they turned out:

Try it sometime this holiday season!  It's a lot of fun!