This shot was a final project for my Advanced Commercial Photography course and it was a very fun challenge. I had read an article about using tin foil to create some cool bokeh effects and I wanted to give it a try on my own. The bokeh effect was created by crumpling up some tin foil, opening it back up, taping it up to some black foamcore, and firing a couple of flashes at it with different color gels on it. Below is a diagram of my setup for the shot. My main lightsource was a strip softbox and I used a gobo with some gold foil on it to bounce some of the light back on the right side.

 

The main challenge I had with this was getting that bokeh effect to work. You need a large aperture to create that really shallow depth of field so the background is blurred out. I was using the standard kit Nikon lens which isn’t designed to have a large aperture. At the longest focal length of 140mm the aperture is quite small so I had to do something different. Luckily there was a selection of lenses in the studio and I was able to pick something more suitable for the shot. I ended up grabbing a 105mm f/2.8 macro lens. This allowed me to have that larger aperture to better create that depth of field I was going for.