How to Make a Blurred Background When Taking a Photo

Use a long lens to shoot a photo with a blurred background.

Blurring a photo's background when shooting applies the concept of "bokeh." This photography term refers to the aesthetic quality of a blur or an out-of-focus area in a photo. Creating this effect requires the use of a long or zoom lens set to shoot distinct foreground and background parts of the photo. The bokeh can provide an artistic composition in which the main subject placed on the foreground looks sharp, and its background looks intentionally blurred.

Instructions

1. Set your main subject at a significant distance to your preferred background. The farther your main subject is to your background, the more blurred the background can be.

2. Use a long or telephoto lens in your camera. You can also use a zoom lens for the process. These detachable lenses can be an option when using a digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) camera. This is a camera popularly used by professional photographers and hobbyists. If you're using a point-and-shoot camera, you can use the zoom function. However, using a consumer camera offers you limited options.

   A long lens has an effect on the angle viewed in the image being shot. It makes your main subject in focus, and the background blurred. The longer the lens, the longer the distance from the camera to the subject should be. Otherwise, the subject will be too large in the frame. Also, the longer the lens, the greater the blurring of the background can be. For the zoom lens, set it to have a longer focal length, which in layman's terms would mean "zooming in."

3. Configure the lens's aperture or opening to a larger setting. The aperture refers to the hole where the light that creates the image inside the camera passes through. When the aperture is larger, there is a shorter depth of field, and the background is more blurred. Changing the aperture is only available in DSLR cameras and select consumer cameras. In most point-and-shoot cameras, you have no control of the aperture, because the settings are set automatically.

4. Focus on the specific element on your foreground that will serve as your photo's main subject. If you are using very long lenses, this can be quite tricky, because even a small difference in the distance of an element in your photo would result to a blur. For instance, if you use a 500-millimeter long lens to shoot a close-up of a face over a mountain background, the face, which is not a flat surface, would have some blurred parts. If you use this type of long lens, choose the specific part of the face on which you want to focus. Often, you can focus on the eyes, then the rest of the elements in the frame would have different degrees of blur. The farther the element is from the focused part, the more blur the non-focused element gets.

Tips & Warnings

• When choosing a lens to use, as a basic guide, a 50-millimeter lens provides you a clear foreground with medium focus difference on a decently distanced background. If using a 135-millimeter lens for the same shot, you can get more blur on the background, and possibly some blurring on the foreground elements that are not the focus of the shot. If you're shooting a statue seen on a third-story terrace of a church from the ground, using a 500-millimeter lens allows you to take a good bokeh shot of the statue from your position.

References

• The Digital Picture: Digital Photography Tips - The Background
• DSLR Tips: DSLR Tips Workshop -- How to Take Portraits with Blurred Backgrounds
• Dutch Blitz; How to Take Photos with a Blurry Background; September 2008
• Greg Jordan Photography; How to Make the Background Blurry; October 2009
• Learning the Light; How to Blur the Background; April 2010
• Empty Easel; How to Create Blurred Backgrounds in Your Photographs by Reducing Depth of Field; Luke Montgomery

Resources

• Ken Rockwell: Bokeh
• Blissfully Domestic; Taking Photos with a Blurry Background; October 2008
• Better Digital Photo: Blur the Background