That’s how you can get a shot like this one: This often works as you’d expect, where uniform elements (e.g., a forest of green leaves) create very smooth bokeh, while messy, jagged elements (e.g., a crowd of people, cars, and houses) create very distracting bokeh.īut there are other background qualities to consider, too.įor instance, if you compose your image so that the light shines through an area of the background, you’ll often capture stunning bokeh effects. Some backgrounds are easy to blur, and other backgrounds are much more difficult. The farther your subject moves from the background, the more beautiful the result. In fact, increasing the subject-background distance is one of the easiest ways to create better bokeh, especially if you don’t own a wide-aperture lens. But if you bring the child out and away from the tree, the bark will begin to blur. If you put them just in front of the tree (so the bark touches their back), both the child and the tree will be in focus, and you’ll get very little bokeh to speak of. Say you’re photographing a child in front of a tree. If your background is close to your subject, it will be less blurred – and hence the bokeh effect will be weaker.īut if your background is far from your subject, it will be more blurred, and will generally look very nice. The greater the distance between the subject and the background, the stronger the bokeh effect! Distance between the camera and your subject So for the best bokeh, purchase a lens with a long focal length (e.g., 200mm), a wide maximum aperture (e.g., f/2.8), and plenty of aperture blades (9+). Third, the longer the lens, the more it compresses the background, and the blurrier the background becomes. More blades equal a more circular aperture, which in turn corresponds to more pleasing bokeh. (Note that aperture shape is primarily determined by the aperture blade count, which you can find on the specification sheet of every lens. Because aperture shape generally determines the shape of the bokeh, the more circular the aperture, the smoother the bokeh effect. Second, some lenses offer more circular apertures, whereas other lenses have hexagonal, septagonal, or octagonal apertures. As discussed above, if you can open your lens’s aperture really wide, the bokeh will look great – whereas a closed-down aperture will produce nervous, distracting bokeh that doesn’t complement the subject. Ultimately, a wide aperture will create a better bokeh effect – because the wider the aperture, the more background blur the lens will produce.įirst, the larger the lens’s maximum aperture, the better the bokeh quality. The aperture is a hole in the lens, and the size corresponds to your camera’s f-number setting.Ī low f-number such as f/1.8 or f/2.8 will give you a wide aperture, while a high f-number such as f/11 or f/16 will give you a narrow aperture. Let’s look at each factor in turn, starting with: 1.
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