Bokeh Lights

Though I've owned my Canon Rebel T3 for a couple of years now, I've not even begun to explore all its capabilities; so, it's been fun to play with it a little this Christmas season exploring new techniques, particularly trying to duplicate the 'bokeh lights' one sees so much this time of year.

What are bokeh lights?  Could not believe the word 'bokeh' was not in my trusty tome-like 'New Oxford American Dictionary'.  Really, I checked twice to be sure.  Wikipedia basically defines 'bokeh' as 'the good blur'.  Well, they included a lot more sophisticated terms incorporating 'lens aberrations' and 'apertures' but we'll just stick with 'the good blur' here.  Centsational Girl posted an easy tutorial how she created her beautiful bokeh lights, and the photos she used in her post, actually on her whole site, are just beautiful.

What's funny is that I thought I was following her instructions, but re-reading her post as I write mine today I realize basically the only instruction I remembered was to focus your camera on an object up close to the lens, remove the object, then snap your photo, so that's what I did to create the shot below, leaving my camera on automatic and using the regular lens.  Regular lens to me is the 18-55 mm lens.  The object up close to my camera I 'focused' on was my fingers.

Added a little 'snowy' vignette in Picasa for the photo below.

UPDATE:  I thought I'd add a photo of how I focused on my fingers.  Looks funny, almost like playing 'shadow puppets', but it works!