How to blur the background

 

How to blur the background

how to blur the background
The background blurred by the long lens (560mm focal length).

How to blur the background

It is often preferred in photography to blur the background. The blurred background can give a special taste to the photo. The blurred background or with the trendy word “bokeh” looks nice and can help to give feelings to the picture.

What are the factors determine how the blur looks like

In general the following factors are the most important:

1. Lens focal length

The background blur is better at longer focal length lenses, preferable 60mm or longer. The longest super telephotos 400-600mm blur the pictures much more then shorter focal length lenses. For portraits usually they use 50-85-135mm lenses. The blur of 85mm lenses are much better than the blur of 50mm lenses.

2. Distance of the subject

The blur is better for closer subjects, than more distant ones. With wide angle lenses even hard to produce blurred background for distant objects. Macro lenses allows closer distances for this distances can blur even better than “normal” lenses.

3. Lens brightness

Brighter lenses blur the background more than darker lenses. The lens brightness is showed with numbers like f/3.5 or f/5.6. The brighter lenses has smaller number after the f/ tag. The brightest lenses has f/1 or f/1.4 lenses usually, but lenses exist with f/0.95 brightness as well.

Out of focus highlights

Canon 24 105 is usm L
Out of focus highlight can give special feeling to the picture. This highlights also can be produced by manual focusing and mis-focus the picture.

Creamy bokeh

It is hard to make “creamy” bokeh. For this very fine bright lenses needed like for example Canon 85mm f/1.8 or 135mm f/2 or 200mm f/2.8 and longer bright lenses as well. If the budget is tight there are some manual focus lens is also available with bright aperture.

 Posted by at 12:40 pm