How to make a heart-shaped bokeh lens hood
These are the tools & materials you’ll need:
• Black paper – normal paper will do, I find no need for thicker paper. This is what your lens hood will be made out of.
• Black tape
• A stencil of the size of your lens [I printed it out because I don’t have a geometry compass]
• A coloured pencil, to draw the heart
• Scissors
• Pen knife + cutting mat
• Ruler
Let’s get started!
After measuring the diameter of your camera’s lens, give a 0.1cm buffer. In which case my lens is 5.6cm in diameter so my stencil is 5.7cm in diameter. Cut along your stencil and you will have yourself a black circle.
As accurately as you can, dot the centre of the circle and then draw a tiny heart around the dot. If you’re doing it free-hand, try not to draw too tiny a heart otherwise cutting it out won’t be so fun. If you have a heart-shaped cutter, all the better! Or star-shaped, it will work too. If not, use a pen knife to dig out the heart!
Cut a strip of your black paper, about 1.4cm in width. You are going to turn this into a ring around your lens so no need for a long long strip.
So your black circle goes on top of your black ring. Be sure to do a fitting on your camera’s lens! Lots of adjusting and frustration here, at least for me.
Tape it together. I manhandle most of my belongings so I TAPED the whole thing together. So there, you have your heart-shaped bokeh lens hood!
The next thing is to make sure your lens is zoomed in all the way (at least 50mm), it reads 55mm on mine and you’re on manual focus.
Put on your lens hood, go to where the bright lights are and see what you come up with!
Comments (30)
