Tis the season for bokeh

Got on my bike and pedaled for a couple of kilometer to shoot various Christmas lights which were adorning the shrubs outside homes. I had a very specific goal in mind in last night's shoot: bokeh. Lots of out of focus lights. Lots of mouth-watering orbs of light. To get the effect I took only my fastest (and cheapest) lens: a 50mm f/1.8. I shot handheld in shutter priority and manual. Left the metering at evaluative.

The owners of this house just balled up some of the lights to make, well, hanging balls of light.

In this house, besides Santa and his elves, they believe in this legend too.

Santa was atop a concrete post on one side of the gate and on the other was ....

Mrs. Claus!

I opened up the aperture to its maximum, turned the focus ring to its minimum focusing distance, and then just went for bokeh bokeh bokeh!

Sometimes you can easily tell when someone really loves Christmas. Wonder how much decors they have inside their home. Wonder how much they spent.

I never expected the image below to come out this way. The subject is a length of rope light that has been shaped so that it forms the outline of a 5-pointed star. These stars were high up on the streetlamps. I took a picture of one with the focus set to manual and turned all the way to focus at the closest distance. Aperture was set to the max of f/1.8. So this is a very out of focus star outline which then formed this kind of star-pentagon-petal image. Most intriguing!