Tonight I decided to try playing around with custom bokeh shapes.  Usually, bokeh appears as circles of out-of-focus light when shooting a wide aperture.  However, you can easily change the shape of the bokeh by placing a sheet of paper or card stock with a cut out directly in front of the camera lens.

For today’s picture, I used an Exacto knife to cut out the shape of a Christmas tree from a sheet of notepad paper.  I then held the paper up against the end of my lens so that the tree cut out was centered on the lens.  I set my lens to manual focus and threw the image of our lit Christmas tree completely out of focus.