The bokeh effect in photography, or how to master background blur

Whether you’re a complete beginner in photography or you’ve already bought your first DSLR and want to improve, this article is for you! You’ve probably already come across some great photos with beautiful background blur, haven’t you? That effect is simply called bokeh, a Japanese term often used for background blur. This article follows on from my piece about depth of field in photography.

The main goal of this photographic technique is to make your subject stand out by surrounding it with an artistic blur. Wondering how to create that blur? How to separate your subject from the background? Which camera settings should you understand if you want beautiful background blur? Did you know you can also influence those blurred areas yourself, along with their tones, colors, and lights? I’ll go through all of these photography tips in this article.

Before explaining technically how to create good bokeh, here are a few things to know.

As I explained in the introduction, bokeh generally refers to the blurred area of an image, most often in the background. I say generally because it is also possible to deliberately create nice bokeh in the foreground in certain shots. That said, remember that the term is often used more specifically to describe the quality of that blur. You might be thinking, blur is blur, right? Not exactly.

The quality of bokeh depends on several factors, including the quality of the lens you use. All lenses contain small blades that make up the diaphragm of the lens. In practical terms, these blades open and close depending on the aperture you choose when you take a photo.

It is no coincidence that lens manufacturers often highlight the number of blades inside a lens. Generally speaking, most people agree that the more blades a lens has, the nicer the bokeh will be. For example, if you compare two Canon 50mm lenses, the 50mm f/1.8 has 5 blades, while the 50mm f/1.4 has 8. And yes, the price almost triples.

Usually, to blur the background, you will shoot wide open, using the smallest f-number available on your lens. Depending on the number of blades, the blur spots in the background will be more or less circular, and therefore more or less pleasing to the eye. Bokeh is often described as “soft, creamy, hard, nervous,” and so on, all words that help describe its quality.

Here is a quick reminder of the elements already mentioned in the article on depth of field. These are the five main points to understand if you want to create background blur.

This is the key factor for getting nice background blur: shoot wide open. By opening your lens aperture as much as possible, you can blur the elements outside the focus area, either in the foreground or, more often, in the background.

Choosing a lens based on its maximum aperture is therefore relevant, because the brighter your lens is (= the larger the aperture = the smaller the f-number), the more you will be able to:

1. Take your photo quickly (remember that aperture and shutter speed are linked),
2. Blur your background. It is no coincidence that the same lens at f/2.8 can cost twice as much as a lens that only opens to f/4.

Another important factor in creating beautiful bokeh is choosing the right focal length. Keep this in mind: the longer your focal length is (for example, 100mm, 200mm, or 300mm), the easier it becomes to create nice background blur.

You will often need to move back from your subject because a long focal length lens usually won’t let you get that close. As a result, you back up and then zoom in, which reduces the depth of field in the scene and increases the blur.

By the way, if you want to learn more about these topics, I invite you to read our detailed article with our best tips for long lens photography!

The final technical point that influences blur is the size of your camera sensor. The larger the sensor (full-frame), the more blurred the background will be, assuming the same framing and settings. This is one reason why creating nice background blur with a smartphone or compact camera is almost impossible. The sensor is simply too small. Conversely, the smaller your sensor is (APS-C sensor), the greater your depth of field will be. This is ideal, for example, for landscape photography.

Once you understand the five factors that allow you to control depth of field and create nice bokeh, here are a few more practical tips and tricks for the field.

Let’s look at it in two different ways. You may want to:

• Blur your background as much as possible to make your subject stand out. This is often the case in wildlife photography (with a long focal length), bird or insect photography, macro photography, or when focusing on a specific subject,
• Create an aesthetic effect by suggesting the background rather than showing it clearly. Extreme blur is not always the only option. You may decide to blur a scene slightly, deliberately, for an aesthetic effect. This is very often seen in food photography, with repetitive subjects (poppy, lavender, or sunflower fields), night photography with beautiful colored lights in the background, and so on.

Here are some purely technical tips you can control during your shooting session. Since you cannot influence the size of your sensor, keep the following three points in mind, to keep things simple:

• Use the longest focal length you have and zoom in with your lens,
• Open your aperture as wide as possible (use the smallest f-number possible),
• Get as close as possible to the subject (if you can’t focus… you’re too close),

A quick technical note: be careful when using a long focal length, such as 250mm. Even at maximum aperture, the available light may not be sufficient to get a sharp photo. In that case, you will need to raise the ISO to avoid motion blur. To keep it simple, switch to A/Av mode (aperture priority), zoom in, and open your aperture as wide as possible by turning the aperture dial to the smallest f-number available. Set your ISO to Auto so you don’t have to manage the shutter speed yourself. The camera will handle it on its own.

To go even further, we have written a full article explaining how to get the sharpest, best-focused photos possible.

Here are a few tips you can apply directly in the field to improve both your background blur and its quality, once you’ve taken the three previous tips into account. My other main piece of advice would be this: move around and pay close attention to your background!

• When you have spotted your subject, focus through your viewfinder and take a first photo. Then look carefully at the background. How does it look to you? If the subject doesn’t stand out enough, your background is probably too close. Move around to find a better angle,
• Once you have better blur, you can still move around to adjust the “blurred points of light” you see in the background. Ideally, make sure they don’t blend into your subject. This is especially noticeable when your background is not very far away and you can still vaguely make something out behind the subject. If your background were 500 meters behind your subject, it would be completely blurred,

• You should also be willing to change position to choose the color of your background. Depending on your shooting angle and how you photograph the subject, you can create completely different moods. For example, if you photograph a mushroom in the middle of a forest, you might have the choice between a green background (foliage or moss behind it), a black background (earth or something similar), or a blue background (the sky, for example). This becomes an aesthetic choice,
• Make sure you choose a background with a pleasant tone that helps your subject stand out. For example, you might decide to shoot during the so-called “golden hour,” around sunrise or sunset. Orange and pink tones can make beautiful backgrounds.

To really understand bokeh and the thought process behind creating it, I’ll share several photos with different types of bokeh. I’ll try to explain each situation as clearly as possible: what stands out, what could have been better, and so on. Below, I’ll use examples from photos I took myself.

What do you think? I always find it useful to have concrete examples explained simply, don’t you? Personally, that often helps me understand things much better in photography. I hope that after these examples, learning photography will feel a little easier!

This is often a type of photography where you’ll want a completely blurred background to make your subject stand out. However, in certain situations, you might want to give the photo a broader sense of scale. This is the case, for example, on safari with a photo of an elephant posing in front of Kilimanjaro. Another classic safari example is a backlit cheetah in a tree, where the atmosphere matters just as much. If you want to go further on the subject, I invite you to read our article on the best tips for wildlife photography.

I took this picture in Thailand with my Canon 70-300mm L IS. It was shot at 300mm, my maximum focal length, and at f/5.6, my maximum aperture at that focal length. So I almost met the three technical conditions, except for being as close as possible to the subject, because, honestly, if you get too close, they jump on you and steal your stuff, those monkeys… anyway.

I’m a few meters away from the monkey. As you can see, I deliberately wanted to blur the background (the ground), which was not especially beautiful. The background is fairly blurred overall, even though you can tell the ground is only a few meters behind the monkey. Having a maximum aperture of only f/5.6 didn’t help me blur the background any more. If I had been able to open to f/2.8, the background would have been even more blurred. Ideally, I should have moved slightly to find a background farther away (not the ground). A more distant background would have been blurrier…

Another textbook case is a photo I took in the jungle in Indonesia, on the island of Sumatra. I’m still using the same lens and the same settings (300mm, wide open at f/5.6). The subject is a few meters away from me, I think (it was a big orangutan).

I took many photos of the scene and, as you can see, the background is very blurred, with a beautiful light green that clearly brings out the orange color of the monkey. Yet you can easily spot the one thing that “ruins the picture,” right? It’s that piece of wood in the background. The image would have been ideal without it, with a uniform green background.

For example, here is a photo with a nice, relatively uniform bokeh on a beautiful dark green background. The monkey stands out very well and nothing distracts from the bokeh behind it. The background is not completely blurred either (there are a few “white blurred circles” in the background).

With a repeated subject, you very often see a light blur used to bring out the mood of a scene. I deliberately stayed in Thailand for this example. Here, there is a noticeable change: I especially wanted to highlight the field of water lilies in front of me. You can tell without too much trouble that there are water lilies in the background. That’s what I was referring to above when talking about repeated subjects. You might wonder why my background is not that blurred when it is much farther away than in the first monkey photo.

At the same time, I tried a close-up. That’s what I would consider a poor photo, or close to it. Why? I’m certainly much closer and at maximum aperture, but you’ll notice that I didn’t bother moving around to place my background farther away. Well, it’s a pond, so I would have had to get down to water level to get a blurred background. But given the shooting angle and the fact that the background (water) is very close to the subject, the bokeh couldn’t be that beautiful.

In the end, the subject stands out a little from the water, but not very well overall. It clearly deserved better framing to improve the background…

Here is an example of a water lily photo that I consider very good. The atmosphere is not the same as in my initial photo. The goal here is to isolate the subject by highlighting it and blurring the background. You’ll notice that the person who took the photo got down to the subject’s height, at the water’s edge. The background is far away, which blurs it to some extent. If I were being picky, it would have been better to shift the angle slightly when taking the photo, so the brown strip at the top of the image wasn’t included, as it isn’t very aesthetic. By shifting a little, it would have been possible to keep only that beautiful apple-green color in the background behind the water lily.

With food photography, things are a bit different, and several styles are commonly used. Very often, though, the background in food photography is never completely blurred. It is usually left to the imagination while a specific subject in the scene is highlighted. Technically, the background (often a plate or a table) is not very far from the subject. Remember that the closer your background is to your focus area, the less blurred it will be.

Here is an example of a fruit arrangement. You can clearly see that the background is not entirely blurred. You can guess what is in the background, but the effort here is to highlight, with perfect sharpness, the slice of orange on the left and the blackberries/roses in the foreground. For instance, the photo has a shallow depth of field, and the slice of apple behind it is already blurred.

Another strong example of food photography. The person deliberately chose to blur the gooseberries (I think) in the background, suggesting they are the source of the juice shown in the image. Only the glass topped with berries in the back is blurred, and the photo works perfectly. The same photo without the blurred gooseberries in the background would not have had the same impact.

In the vast majority of cases (outside the studio, where backgrounds are chosen deliberately), the subject is what needs to stand out as sharply as possible, which means blurring the background as much as possible. One excellent Canon lens for this is the 85mm f/1.2 L.

To illustrate my point, here is a comparison of the bokeh from three Canon 85mm lenses, with maximum apertures of f/1.2, f/1.4, and f/1.8 respectively. I’ll let you guess which one is the most expensive… As you can see, the “blurred circles” in the background are much more transparent and far less defined than on the f/1.8. It’s a detail, but for many professional photographers, it matters.

Here is an example of a superb portrait, most likely shot outdoors. As you can see, the background is completely blurred and has a beautiful orange/yellow hue. It was probably a deliberate choice when the photo was taken, likely in the late evening. I almost regret the “white area” at the bottom left of the picture, which draws a little too much attention…

Another beautiful example, in a very different atmosphere. Here is a portrait with a perfectly blurred background. You can’t really make anything out anymore, which probably means the background is quite far away (not to mention that the photo was probably taken at a wide aperture). The photographer deliberately placed the subject behind a tree so you can see it in the foreground. That foreground is also nicely blurred.

I’ll finish with this specific category. This is even more true than in wildlife photography in general: we almost always look for the perfect blurred background, or in other words, perfect bokeh. Something soft, well lit, and pleasing to the eye.

Here’s a classic: a telephoto shot of a kingfisher. Notice how the blur is perfect, bright, and soft. Nothing distracts from the subject. This type of photo is taken with a large telephoto lens (usually a focal length of 400mm or even 600mm) and very often a very large aperture (often around f/2.8). The kind of lens that costs several thousand euros.

The superb photo above is by one of my photographer friends, Martin Itty. I really invite you to have a look at his portfolio. He creates some beautiful work.

Here, by comparison, is another photo of a kingfisher. If you are starting to get the hang of it, you should notice several things:

• The bokeh is less blurred than in the first photo and a little harder overall,
• The color of the bokeh is not ideal for bringing out the subject,
• Last but not least, you can see things in the background that catch the eye: clear lines. As mentioned earlier, it isn’t very aesthetic, especially since they fall right behind the bird. They are most likely branches located closer than the green background behind them. If they had been at roughly the same distance, they would have been more blurred. If the shot had been prepared by the photographer, by hiding in a blind for example, it would have been useful to take a test shot while focusing on the piece of wood. Those branches would have been immediately visible in the background. We could then have moved slightly, varied the framing to exclude them, or even removed them by hand. It might make you smile, but if you’re interested in photography, you’ll often have to cut a branch or some grass to keep it from getting in the way of your photo.

That’s it; I’ll wrap up this article on bokeh with these examples, which I hope have helped you better understand how to create nice background blur in a photo and which parameters you need to take into account. As you will have understood, creating nice bokeh is not that simple, and you’ll need a few tries to master the concept. In any case, it’s a very interesting photographic exercise that requires patience and practice: learning how to frame, capture the mood of a background, crop properly, soften a light source, and so on.

Fans of post-processing/post-production with Photoshop will tell you that it is now possible to create this kind of blur with photo editing software. That is certainly true, but I prefer to spend time behind my camera rather than behind my computer, don’t you?

In the meantime, if you are a fan of photography and discovery, I invite you to come and read the article on the best travel photography tips. You will undoubtedly learn a lot!

How did you find these photo tips? Too technical? Clear? Good to have concrete examples? Tell me all about it.
I’ll see you soon,

Written by Sylvain PONS

I've been passionate about photography since 2010, learning as I went along. Today, I dedicate myself to guiding others in their choice of camera gear and sharing a variety of tips to improve their photography skills.

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