Camera accessories are some of my favorite things to 3D print. Photography can be an expensive hobby and one that rewards experimentation and creativity.
Fortunately, a 3D printer makes it easy to try things for just a few cents in raw materials and a short wait.
How bokeh shapes work
Control the shape of light as it enters your lens
Have you ever seen a low-light photograph where the lights in the background are blurry but take on a specific shape? He The spots are more commonly known as bokeh.and typically take the shape of the aperture ring on your lens. The more blades on the ring, the more edges the bokeh lights will have.
What’s happening here is that the out-of-focus areas, particularly the smaller, easier to distinguish highlights, are taking the shape of the light as it enters the lens. You can use this to your advantage with filters that fit the lens and create specific shapes.
Generally speaking, the larger the aperture (meaning a lower f/stop, like f/1.8), the “better” the bokeh. However, the effect has its limitations, so it is commonly used in some specific scenarios. It is very popular in festive scenes, such as adding stars to the back of a Christmas tree, but there is no reason it should be limited to this use.
Shapes such as hearts and paw prints can be used any time of year, as long as the background of the scene allows them to be easily distinguished in the final image. They could be distant lights in a landscape, colored lights or garden lights on a warm summer night, or candles in a restaurant at night.
You need good separation between the subject and the background, which is where a high aperture comes into play. You also need a decently long lens (meaning a higher focal length), as the effect requires covering the lens with a filter. If the lens is too wide, the filter itself will be visible in the photo and will cause the image to appear vignetted.
Print your own adapters and filters
Print only what you need
This effect has gained popularity among photographers who like to experiment, but it usually requires a bit of manual work. Normally, you would need to trace a shape and cut it out, then place it on your lens and find some way to keep it there.
If you’re not particularly good at cutting out shapes, you may find this a challenge. Making adapters with cards is fine, but they don’t last like those made with even The cheapest PLA 3D printing filament.. It can also be difficult to cut out finer details without damaging the filter.
Print a Complete set of bokeh effect filters It took me just over 30 minutes including calibration time and cost me just over 5g worth of filament. The adapter took about the same time. I used black filament for maximum light blocking ability and only printed the adapters I thought I would actually use.
Also included with the set is a solid filter, which I decided to have a little fun with.
Create your own bokeh shapes on your slicer
Your mileage may vary
With the included solid black filter, creating your own shapes is relatively trivial. I did this with the How-To Geek logo, but I wasn’t sure if it would work. Fortunately that was the case!
To do this, I simply dragged the logo SVG file into Bambu Studio and onto the build plate I was using. I right clicked on it and used Split > To Objects to separate the various parts of the logo, focusing only on the “HTG” bit, then removing the rest. I then selected all the remaining fragments and grouped them with the Bind option in the context menu.
From here, I scaled the logo to fit inside the disk, then used the Move tool to make the two intersect. I hit mesh booleanselected Subtractand made sure the logo was removed from the disc (and not the other way around) before pressing Execute.
The end result was a record with the HTG logo cut out. You could do this with basically any shape that you can import into the slicer of your choice. Typically, this requires an SVG file to work correctly (it doesn’t work with transparent PNGs, for example).
You can do this relatively easily with a free app like Inkscape. Bambu Lab even has a tutorial for this on their wiki.
I actually downloaded a 49mm adapter (with larger 40mm filters) before printing the 46mm adapter (with 28mm filters). My 24mm Sony lens was too wide, so I had to settle for a longer and slightly narrower Sigma 60mm lens.
Even with both sets printed, the filament cost was absolutely trivial. The last time I used the HTG logo was in a 3D printed t-shirt transfer.
