Using a little Pinterest inspiration...

So many fantastic holiday photo ideas floating around on pinterest. 

I loved this idea and decided to give it a try for our Christmas cards this year. 

Here are some straight out of camera images that I am not using for our card, but that doesn't mean I don't love them :) I didn't edit them so you could see what they look like without any editing. 

Head on over to Prop Insanity for a step by step tutorial for this set up. 

I used my 50mm 1.4 lens for all of the shots I took. I also had to use my studio lighting since I didn't have great natural light in my house today. To get the nice blur, I had to shoot at 1.4  and the kids were about 7 feet in front of the lights. I had to place them that far in front so the green strands wouldn't show from the lights. I was too cheap to go buy lights with white strands instead of the green. When shooting at that wide open aperture (f 1.4) it is absolutely necessary to keep all of your subjects on the exact same plane or they won't all be in focus. Placing a subject even slightly behind another will result in creepy stalker images like this one....

Although, I don't mind creepy stalker when they are this cute.
Have fun shooting your holiday pictures using twinkly lights and creating some beautiful bokeh!
In photography, bokeh is the blur, or the aesthetic quality of the blur, in out-of-focus areas of an image, or the way the lens renders out-of-focus points of light.


Which by the way is pronounced like this....