Sparkly portraits

Jason Parnell-brookes shows you how adding some fairy lights and shooting in the blue hour can bring your portraits into a new magical light

Use fairy lights to make your shots shine bright like a diamond

This style of portrait involves dangling fairy lights in front of or around your subject, and trailing them up towards the end of your lens for dreamy circles of ‘bokeh’ – outof-focus highlights taking on the shape of the lens aperture.

In this project we’re going to further combine the out-offocus fairy lights with glowing city lights in the background to accentuate this bokeh look.

To get the city lights in the background we’ll have to wait until after sunset, and in doing so we get to shoot in the ‘blue hour.’ This is before it gets truly dark, when the landscape is bathed in a cooler, bluer light. The combination of the blue light of the sky and the orange glow of the lights complement each other in the final shot.

You’ll need to shoot on a lens with a wide aperture – here we’ve used a 50mm f/1.4 – but any lens with an aperture of f/4 or wider should work fine. It’ll still work with a narrower maximum aperture, but the bokeh won’t be as large.