The word "bokeh" comes from a Japanese word meaning ”blur” or ”haze” and refers to the part of the image that you have intentionally blurred by using a selective depth of field - aka your blurry background!

This affect is used a lot in photography to focus the eye on a specific subject within the frame (particularly in portrait photography to isolate the person from a background, but really for ANY subject) and just to create a more pleasing image. I personally LOVE me a bit of bokeh in my images!

That’s why we’ve got 5 tips (plus an extra bonus one right at the end!) for getting good bokeh in your images.

Before we dig into the tips, a couple of things to note:

If you aren’t already familiar with how to intentionally blur your background, have a look at this earlier post on how to get a blurred background -it's written with beginners in mind, so it has step by step instructions to get your started, so you will find that really helpful too if you are just starting out!

Secondly, if you don’t have a DSLR or camera where you can manually change your settings, you will likely have a ”portrait” mode - use this setting and the camera will blur the background for you, and you can still use some of these tips to help maximise that blur.

Alright, without further ado, here are the steps for getting good ”bokeh” - the creamy, dreamy kind that makes your subject pop off the background!

Learn all about photography bokeh with these photography tips! We'll look at how to get a bokeh portrait, so you can get a blurry background in your photos!

1) Shoot at a Low Aperture

If you only follow one rule - let this be it!

Use a small F number to give you a wide aperture and throw your background out of focus.

I would suggest using F2.8 or lower - I personally will shoot at quite low apertures, such as F1.8 or F2.0, however, please note it will take practice to use lower F stops and still get your intended subject all in focus!

If you only have the kit lens that came with your camera you might want to invest in a lens that goes down to these lower apertures - the Canon 50mm f/1.8 is an affordable example, and so is the Canon 85mm f/1.8.

Primes lenses are probably best for bokeh because they go to lower apertures than their zoom counterparts, but zooms will also work well, especially those with a longer focal length and fixed aperture.

All that being said, you can still get good bokeh at higher aperture numbers, depending on your distance from the subject and the distance of your subject from the background, so we’ll turn our attention to that next!

If you are not 100% sure what aperture settings you should be using when, then be sure to download my FREE manual settings cheat sheet, as it details it ALL for you (plus shutter speed and ISO so you're full covered😀)

2) Separate Your Subject From The Background

The second way to get more background blur is simply to put as much distance between your subject and the background as you can.

The further away from the background they are, the more the background will blur. (If your subject is up against a wall you won’t get much bokeh, no matter what you do!)

So try pulling your subject a good distance away from the background, like in the image below, to maximise the blur.

3) Get Close To Your Subject

Another thing you can do to get better bokeh is simply to stand physically closer to your subject, as the depth of field will be much shallower in this situation.

Now, you might not always be able to do this depending on the shot you want, but just be aware that a headshot where you are close to your subject will have MORE blur than a full body shot, even if your settings are exactly the same.

One word of warning - just be careful not to get TOO close and stay within the minimum focusing distance of your lens.

4) Use A Longer Focal Length

You will also see more dramatic blur using a 135mm lens than you will using a 50mm lens.

If you are using a zoom, zoom all the way in to the longest focal length (but be aware than on some cheaper zoom lenses the image quality can drop off at the highest zoom range) or put on a longer length prime.

The blur is magnified with a longer length lens, making it look more out of focus (this is due to something called Lens Compression - although it's not often discussed this can make a HUGE impact on how your final image turns out. You can read all about it and see some examples on this post on Understanding Lens Compression!)

So if you have a chose of lenses, make sure you use the one with the higher focal length number. This image below was taken with a 135mm lens, which does give beautiful bokeh!

5) Think about your Background

To get really pleasing and pretty bokeh, look at the background that will be blurred out.

If you have a dark background with no points of light the tones of the background will fade and merge into one another. This can be made even more beautiful if you have a lovely range of tones in the image (you can see an example of this type of background in a couple of the images posted above)

If you have light in the out of focus area these will be seen as small circles of light. (A lot of people think bokeh only refers to these circles of light but that’s not right! The photographer who first coined the phrase bokeh used it to mean ALL the blurry hazy areas of the image)

So if you want light circles, then be sure to have points of light in the background! The more points of light the more circles you will have.

Another point to note is that higher quality lenses will result in smoother circles, whilst with more entry level lenses, you can see the “shape” of the aperture.

Bonus tip!

One of the biggest problems I see with people trying to get good bokeh in their images is that they try to shoot “wide open” - meaning that they use the largest aperture (smallest F number!) that they can, regardless of what they are photographing. The result is usually a soft or out of focus image!

DO make sure that you are using the right aperture for what you are trying to photography - bokeh only works when you have areas of the scene IN focus, so be sure to download my FREE manual settings cheat sheet which is going to give you suggested camera settings for different types of images. Go here to grab your copy!

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