Hollywood lens hack

‘Net’ a lens to get a lush Hollywood-style soft focus in camera

adding a touch of soft focus can transform the mood of your photography. It can add dreamy quality to portraits, produce fantastic flaring and halation effects for lighting, and can recreate glamorous blackand-white Hollywood movie star headshots.

You can achieve soft focus in a number of ways: you can buy a speciality lens, such as the Canon EF 135mm f/2.8 Softfocus; you can mimic the effect in post (see our Photoshop Elements tutorial on page 58); or you can use a classic cinematography technique called ‘netting’ to do it in-camera.

This process uses a pair of tights or stockings to ‘net’ your lens, giving you a unique degree of control to produce an ultracreative soft focus. Using light or dark tights stretched tightly or loosely enables you to manipulate the diffusion in your shot, and whether the highlights or shadows and midtones are affected.

In addition to increasing or decreasing the diffusion of your light sources, netting your lens can also produce halos, flares and starbursts. So this technique can even modify your lighting, giving you an amazing amount of creative agency for a minimal amount of effort and expenditure.

Best of all, the technique can be performed on any lens mounted on any camera. So once you’ve acquired your tights, you can start experimenting with every bit of glass in your kit bag!