I'll explain my four light setup but also show you what to do if you only have two or three.įirst off set up your two back lights behind the model and above head height and angled past the model towards where your camera will be. I took my shots with four lights but the principles of this setup an be achieved with two lights if that's all you have. Once your glass is in place you'll want to setup your lights - wait until the last possible moment to spray the glass as it will run off even with the glycerine. Food photographers use this trick all the time to get those fresh tomatoes covered-in-water-droplets type shots. With the addition of the glycerin in your sprayer you can spray some on the glass and it should bead up to create those little droplets you're after. You want to thicken the water so that it doesn't immediately run off the glass you're about to spray it onto. The reason you need this is to thicken your water which glycerin does really well as it's very thick and completely colourless. I think it's also a product that helps with severe eczema so I picked up a big bottle of it at a local pharmacy for about £1.

Glycerine is used to preserve foods, in cosmetics, inks, glues, antifreeze and even medicine. Glycerine is one of those products that you've never heard of until you have and then you see it literally everywhere. The formula is pretty straight forward, it's glycerine and water, nothing too crazy. I simply bought a garden/hair sprayer for 99p at the DIY store and then mixed my formula to put inside it. Next you'll need the 'mystical orb' creating spray.

1 shallow aperture lens - Ideally around f2.8 or less.

1 dark background - This can be anything from a black sheet/velvet to a black colourama.

1 small softbox as a fill light modifier but a reflector can be a substitute here.

2 directional lighting modifiers - snoot, grid or barn doors etc.

2 - 4 Lights (the principles of this setup can be achieved with two lights).

So how can we harness these 'mystical orbs' into our studio shots to create something a bit more engaging than yet another sunlight-through-leaves bokeh effect? You will need To a non-photographer, explaining bokeh is far harder than you might think. In my youth I worked in a photo lab where we developed film and I remember customers opening their prints for the first time and exclaiming that they'd captured these 'weird mystical orbs' in their shots. Put simply bokeh are light artefacts that appear in our images when we capture spots of extremely out of focus light. We may love it so much because we capture something that isn't actually there, we can't see it with our eyes and so I think it holds a measure of excitement in us as we eagerly check the back of the camera awaiting the image to appear to show us what our eyes cannot. Bokeh is something that us as photographers love but I'm not entirely sure why.

Bokeh lights