HOW TO GET A BLURRY BACKGROUND IN-CAMERA! Depth of field explained.

this video is brought to you by Squarespace if you need a website or domain check out squarespace.com for an all-in-one solution hey everyone and welcome back to a new video have you looked at someone else's photography and thought to yourself how the heck did they get that nice blurry background why don't my photos look like that in this video I'm going to show you the equipment settings and creative choices that you can make that will make the backgrounds to your photos blurry in camera don't forget to stay for my bonus tip where I dispel the myth that larger sensors create blurrier backgrounds and I'll show you what actually happens my name is Simone and I'm a professional nature and wildlife photographer living in Eastern Canada I make weekly videos giving you photo tips or taking you behind the scenes for wildlife and nature photography subscribe if you want to see more shut your mouth [Music] so in this video I'm going to show you four techniques to get blurry backgrounds sometimes called a bokeh which more specifically actually describes the aesthetic quality of the blur it's actually a Japanese word pronounced bouquet but in many parts of the world it's pronounced Boca both are okay blurry backgrounds are often prized for their ability to make highlights and shapes in the background smooth and soft looking and by contrast make the subject in front of them pop I use this in my Wildlife photography to tame distracting elements in the background like branches or grasses while allowing my subject to really stand out even telephone poles now not all photography genres want or need this effect but in some like portraiture or Wildlife it's often prized so let's start off with what makes the backgrounds blurry in the first place so what I tell you later makes a lot more sense most of what causes a blurry background comes from being out of focus the more out of focus the blurrier if I take a photo of this lineup of batteries for example notice how the farther the battery is back from the one in the focus the blurrier it is now this is the opposite of what's in Focus what's within What's called the depth of field that's the part of the image within acceptable Focus to get a blurrier background we need more out of focusness if you'll pardon me for inventing a word I use this visual for understanding depth of field and its impact on backgrounds light travels from our subject to the lens Elements which in turn bend them to come to a focus on the sensor of your camera the place where the light rays converge at our subject and are very close together are in perfect Focus but there's also a space before and after where the focus may not be perfect but is good enough to be in focus to our eyes this area is called the depth of field that is the distance between the closest and farthest part of the photo that are acceptably Sharp things that are before or after this depth of field where the light beams are too far apart are out of focus and the farther they are away from the InFocus area the more out of focus and blurry they are so to get blurry backgrounds we usually need what's called a thinner depth of field that is a thin plane in Focus so that things in the background look even blurrier but I'm also going to show you how to get a blurrier background with the same depth of field so there are four ways that we can achieve blurrier backgrounds in our photography let's look at number one the first way to get a thinner depth of field and hence a blurrier background is to use a wider aperture on your lens by wider I mean setting your lens aperture to be as open as it can be represented on your camera as the smallest F number so F4 is larger than F 5.6 F 2.8 is larger again in the example we used earlier if we open up the aperture of the lens we see that the light range represented by the lines here converge at a steeper angle this creates a thinner plane of acceptable focus a dollar depth of field this also makes the light rays even farther from focus in the background rendering the background softer and less distracting to your subject so to implement this in the field you want to be able to control the aperture on your lens you can either shoot in manual where you set the aperture shutter speed and ISO or you can shoot an aperture priority AV on most cameras that's where you set the aperture and the camera picks the shutter speed needed to balance the exposure set the aperture on your lens to a small F number like 2.8 or even lower if your lens allows now when it comes to aperture there's also an equipment Choice variable here how wide you can open up your aperture and get a blurry background from it will depend on the maximum aperture of your lens most lenses have variable apertures that can be adjusted but they all have one thing in common a maximum aperture to which they can be set this is usually written right on the lens this is often a prized attribute of a lens as on top of gathering more light it can blur the background even more and in some genres This is highly valued now while not always the case prime lenses that is lenses with a fixed focal length like this fixed 50 millimeter lens and this fixed 500 millimeter lens are often offered with faster apertures than zoom lenses so this 500 millimeter lens is an F4 which would make for blurrier backgrounds than a similar 500 millimeter zoom lens that would often have the largest aperture at 5.6 or 6.3 this 50 millimeter lens has a maximum aperture of f 1.4 this allows for very blurry backgrounds compared to a similar focal length shot at F4 for example like in these two photos so in short use lenses with large maximum apertures for smooth blurry backgrounds and set them at their maximum or widest aperture for the maximum effect the next choice you can make to make a blurrier background is your choice of focal length there are two things that play here with long focal lengths and blurry backgrounds one is real and one is a trick the first which is real is that longer focal length lenses when shot at similar distances make for a thinner depth of field and blurier backgrounds behind the subject if we look at our visual here the longer focal lengths magnification in effect brings the subject in closer and makes steeper light rays which in turn makes for shallower depths of field and blurier backgrounds I use this effect all the time in my Wildlife photography where I use long lenses to blur out the background and make the subject pop from the frame I'd like to thank the sponsor of this video Squarespace I use Squarespace to make my very own website and it was easy they have lots of templates to choose from or you can customize pages with easy drag and drop sections for photos videos clickable buttons texts or links when I recently added tours to Botswana to my offerings it was easy to add a new page to to my website with photos videos and give some profile on my website with links right to my home page you can even get people to subscribe to your newsletter and offer them a free download in return if you wish like I've done head to squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com forward slash Simon to save 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain now the second issue at play here is actually an illusion if you try different focal length lenses but move to keep the subject the same size in the frame the depth of field is actually the same but yet the background looks blurrier you may be thinking what kind of magic is this this is because as you increase the focal length you're zooming in on the background as well this increasing magnification of the background makes it look bigger and blurrier because you're seeing a smaller slice of it here's a sample of what this looks like using a great website called dofsimulator.net where you can calculate the depth of field using different parameters note that if the size of the subject remains constant as I use longer focal lengths the depth of field shown here doesn't change yet the background gets blurrier I know that looks weird but that's the way it works so to implement this in the field use longer focal lengths or if you have a zoom lens use the longest end of the zoom lens to get the maximum effective blur so on a 70 to 200 millimeter lens the 200 millimeter setting will give you a blurrier background than 70. the third way of getting a blurrier background is to get closer to your subject that's because as you get closer the light rays converge more steeply again creating a thinner depth of field and by corollary a blurrier background now depending on your genre this may or may not be an option in Wildlife like I shoot sometimes we can get closer using good feel techniques or camouflage but sometimes it's not an option if it is an option for you the good news is it's easy to implement no setting changes needed just get closer to your subject and have a closer Focus point so if you have the choice between standing at one spot thought and cropping your image a bit or getting closer and not cropping closer will give you a blurrier and smoother background note that you can't do this indefinitely for a blurrier background lenses all have minimum Focus distances that is the closest you can get and still get the lens to focus on wide-angle lenses this may only be inches or centimeters but on my big 500 millimeter lens the closest I can get to my subject and still focus is about 10 feet or 3 meters now there's another trick you can use to get a blurry background that actually doesn't involve getting a thinner depth of field and that is getting the background farther away behind your subject this is because there's a direct relationship between the distance from the subject and blurriness the areas of focus in an image don't go from way out of focus to perfect Focus to way out of focus again they go from way out of focus gradually into more focus and smoothly again to more out of focus the farther behind your subject you can place the background the blurrier it will be I use this technique all the time in Wildlife photography where I'll move sideways around the subject to get an angle with a background can be further and more out of focus for example while photographing bee eaters in Botswana by positioning the boat such that the background was put way into the distance we could get a photo that went from this with grasses right behind the subject to this where the background is several hundred meters away the one with the cleaner background just makes the subject pop from the frame and is now clearly the star of the show rather than having to compete with a busy background so the technique here is either to move your subject away from the background or position yourself to have the background farther away from your subject by choosing a different vantage point for example if you're photographing someone in front of a wall rather than standing 90 degrees to it right directly in front of it move to the side and get some distance between your subject and the background and I promised you a bonus tip and that's to dispel a myth about sensor sizes and depth of field while photos coming from cameras with larger sensors seem to have blurrier backgrounds it's not actually the sensor size that's affecting the quality of the background the image Circle projected into the camera by the same lens when using a full frame and a crop sensor camera is exactly the same the only difference is that the full frame camera is capturing a larger field of view than the crop sensor the background blur in the two images is the same ah but here's the rub the larger sensor because it's capturing a wider field of view often makes you get closer to the subject to fill the frame as we learned earlier getting closer will indeed make the background blurrier so it's the getting closer that makes the background blurrier not the sensor size there's nothing in the physics of a large sensor that blurs the background as the quality of the background transmitted through the lens is the same regardless of what sensor size captures it after that if you want to learn more about sensor sizes the differences it makes for your photography and the pros and cons of each I have a whole video on that subject which you can check out right here if you found this video deserving give it a like and YouTube will show it to even more people helping others in their photography journey I hope you can use this information to go out there and get your own unique and amazing photos I know you can do it

Channel: Simon d'Entremont

Views: 119,945

Keywords: photography, photography tips, photography tutorial, digital photography, photography tutorials, mirrorless camera, photography course, photography basics, photography composition, camera tips, beginner photography, how to blur the background of a video, blur background like expensive lens, depth of field tutorial, bokeh effect, how to blur background in photo, blurry background, blurry background photography, blurry background video, blurry background tiktok

Id: 6LuvQdGXb4M

Length: 12min 5sec (725 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 11 2023