Lomography

Have Fun with Aperture Shapes!
written by dogma on March 24th, 2009 , 16 comments (8 votes)

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Fancy some stars in your images? Maybe you’re feeling down and could use some cheering up with some smiles? If yes get ready, because this trick will knock you out!

You will need:

• piece of black paper
• pencil
• duct tape
• sharp blade scissors
• camera with lens which aperture we could set on f2 or at least f2.8
• some of your creativity!

First thing you need to do measure your camera lens diameter and draw the size of circle on piece of black paper.

Now the next step is really important. Invoke your creativity and think about a shape in which you would like to turn all light sources in your pictures. Draw that shape in the center of your circle. Shape size should be like f4 – f5.6 aperture of your chosen camera lens.

In my drawings you can see heart, star and smile, but you can try any other, just be creative. Use a sharp blade and cut your drawing out.

Take the scissors and cut the circle out.

Now take some pieces of a duct tape and use it to stick your paper circle on the front of your camera lens.

Just before shooting, open your camera aperture to its maximum value and you are almost ready to shoot. There is one important thing you need to know before shooting – all light source that will not fall in the focus range will turn in those shapes yo made. For example in my pictures that beautiful lady is sitting 1m far from camera, my Christmas tree lights are hanged on the table 5m from camera, so I focused my cam to the lady and simply took a shot. The lights were not in focus rather blurred and that’s why they ended up having those shapes just as what I had in my custom made aperture. If the lights would fall in to the focus range they would look normal (no custom shape).

For this trick I used my lovely mechanical beast FED 5c , but you can use any other camera which has a lens with changeable and wide aperture.