Couple months ago I saw a video with some filmmaking or photography tips and the guy showed a tip for those who have ZOOM lenses, what he said was that you need a zoom lens to get bigger focal length so it gives you more „blurry background,” well… you can obtain it with the prime lens too, let me show you how!
Today we will talk about something called bokeh. For those who doesn’t understand this magic word it comes from Japanese „BOKE” and means blur and more so quality of this blur, so actually when something on the photo is out of focus it’s considered as bokeh. Next time when you miss your focus you can just say „I did it on purpose, it’s bokeh bro.” - No, don’t do that.
Here’s a simple example to understand that: grab a pen, put it in front of your face and look at it. You see a sharp pen and the rest is blurry. Bokeh makes your subject isolated from the background and gives it more „professional” look. Now how to achieve it on your shot? Bokeh depends of couple things which are:
The aperture of your lens
The distance between you and subject of your photo
Focal length of your lens
Let’s start with aperture it’s always better to use really fast lenses to get better results. The lower F-stop you set the more blurry background you’ll get, and in the opposite when you set your F-stop at 12 you see that the background is much less blurry, what is actually happening is that lowering your aperture decreases the depth of field.
but what to do if you don’t have a really fast lens like 1.2 or 1.4? There is the second thing - the distance. You can simply get closer to your subject it’s the same situation like with your eye looking at the pen. When you come closer the background is more blurry and the depth of field is smaller.
Another thing is that you can place the subject further from the background, so you won’t get blurry background if you’re shooting something standing in front of the wall.
The last thing is the focal length of your lens. Longer lenses give you lower depth of field, and at the same time more creamy bokeh, so the subject looks more separated from the background. Also the bokeh on longer lenses looks more interesting because of bigger distance that you need to take between you and the subject, it means that the background behind your subject seems bigger and closer. For example lights in the background are bigger on the 50mm than on the 16mm.