You can watch a video tutorial on how I did this above. To the first 5 US residents that contact me with your address, I will mail you enough black construction paper so you can try this out! Between that and ordering the craft knife you won’t even have to make a trip to the store to give this a try!

This little knife is key because the designs have to be very small and (can be) intricate:

Here are the steps to take pictures like this:

1. Watch the video tutorial I made

2. Find a light source(s) that are bright and contrasty to what’s around it: christmas lights, candles, street lights, etc.

3. Put that thing you made on your fast lens and set it to the widest aperture you have (and aperture priority), my Canon 28mm goes to f/1.8

4. If you don’t have a really fast lens, try and get as far away from the light source(s) as possible

5. Experiment with distance to the camera and the focus distance you use on your lens to focus (the light source must be way out of focus)

6. Don’t get discouraged! My first photo, as you can see in my video, sucked, keep experimenting with it to get best results, if you’re still having trouble contact me

The limitation of taking pictures of things with this on your camera is that since your camera is set to it’s closest focus distance, your subjet will have to be very close to the camera, unless the light source is very far away (experiment!).

You can also take images of just these blurry background lights and composite them into other images using Photoshop:

1. Open the two images you want to combine, in this case, one will have just the custom bokeh shapes and the other is your main subject.

2. Put the bokeh layer on top.

3. Change it’s blending mode from ‘Normal’ to ‘Screen’ (this is assuming you’re using a bokeh image with a black background like the ones I provide below – click them to enlarge, then right-click, choose “Save Image As…”)

4. Now all you should see are the custom bokeh shapes

5. Add a layer mask to the bokeh layer and use a black brush to paint away where the bokeh is covering your foreground subject (the other image you opened that is the layer below this one)

DOWNLOAD and try the above directions:

It’s very simple: combine Chia seeds (8 tbsp), Sugar (4 tbsp), Warm water (3 c), and lime juice (2 limes) – then refrigerate – but you might want to stir intermittently while it’s initially cooling down in the frig so you don’t get big chunks. That is the recipe I use, I’m sure you can find others out there, I know I found one that suggested putting a little rum in it to make it like a mojito.

I just bought some Chia seeds bulk for fairly cheap ($10/lb) at getchia.com, but there might be cheaper places on the internet, let me know if you find them. It’s definitely cheaper than the green grocery in town that is $18/lb.

Interested more in the book “Born to Run” :

I’ll go ahead and apologize for no in-flight pictures, my wife took our little camera on a relief trip to Haiti (good excuse huh).

We launched a little late, about 3pm, I landed around 6pm and had a great flight overall. Below is a screen shot of FlyChart which comes with a 6030 vario and lets you get all nerdy with your flight – you can see speed, altitude, and vario all plotted and aligned together.

Oh and I titled this with the “Milk Run” because that’s what Ollie calls flying this route, I think he stole milk as a child or something . . .

Click it to make bigger

What I mean is the fact I was on top of the hill and the road fell away from the image and gave me the ability to get the road and the sunset in the shot together, but also because it had been snowing, the road was wet which reflected the sunset. It goes back to the adage that the best camera is the one you have with you (I also didn’t go to this spot to take a photo, I just happened upon the situation). I didn’t have my Canon 7D so I used my iPhone and tweaked the photo in some Apps: TrueHDR, Cropulator, TiltShift Generator.

This is the image I talk about: