It’s common knowledge that the bokeh in pictures will reveal what the aperture looks like. A good example are lights turning into stars when you do long exposure with small amerture, like f16.
For this trick you will need a lens with big aperture, like f1.8 or f1.4, otherwise your custom aperture and the internal aperture will overlap (or you need to make yours really small). I used an old Nikkor f1.4 manual focus lens.
Cut out any shape you want out of a opaque material and put it directly in front of your lens – voila. It looks like this:
With this, I created the following cheesy shots:
This way you can create nice backgrounds for your christmas shots. 🙂
For BGs this sure works well. You could try the blue banded palm civet mascot you did for this company’s mascot contest and the last BG above in the back.
Sure this’ll look chistmassy