Bokeh

I've been experimenting with a lot of different ways to take a picture with my camera. One of the techniques I've been playing around with is Bokeh.
The word is actually derived from the japanese word boke (ぼけ), which means blur. In photography it refers to the out-of-focus part of a picture made by the lens with a large aperture because their depth of field is pretty shallow.
One of the things I've been doing is trying to manipulate the points of light in the background that are out of focus. I made some cut-outs to fit in front of my camera lens with different shapes. I made this out of old lids from butter/margarine tubs. They are soft enough to cut with an X-acto knife and stiff enough to hold its shape.

Examples:
This one was just to see if it will work.


The following are self portraits with different cut-outs.
Star cut-out:


Spade cut-out:


Wheel cut-out:


I'm still playing around with different shapes. Some have worked out but others not so well. I'm going to be trying out a Hello Kitty cut-out (yeah Celia asked me to try to make one).