WARM UP THE BLUE HOUR

Jason Parnell-Brookes shows you how draping a subject in fairy lights and shooting in the blue hour can bring your portraits into a magical new light

You can create magical-looking portraits by simply dangling fairy lights in front of or around your subject and trailing them up towards your lens to produce dreamy bokeh - circles of out-of-focus highlights that take on the shape of the lens aperture.

In this project we're going to combine the out-of-focus fairy lights with glowing city lights in the background to accentuate the dreamlike effect. To capture the city lights we had to wait until after sunset and shoot in the 'blue hour! This is the period before it gets truly dark, when the landscape is bathed in a cool, blue light. The combination of the blue light of the sky, the background street lights and the orange glow of the fairy lights will complement each other wonderfully in the final shot.

You'll need a lens with a wide maximum aperture - we used a 50mm f/1.4 but any lens with an aperture of f/4 or wider will work fine; you can use a narrower aperture, but the bokeh won't appear as large in the frame.

1 CHOOSE YOUR LENS

A lens with a wide aperture and a longer focal length will produce a shallow depth of field; this means more of the scene in front of and behind the point of focus will be out of focus, which in turn means you'll get more prominent bokeh effects in the foreground. Here you can see the difference between shots taken at f/2.8 and f/1.4, with an f/1.4 aperture creating bigger circles of bokeh.

2 CHOOSE YOUR LIGHTS