Happy Exposure

A friend recently asked me how to get shots where the background is blurry but the object you are photographing is in sharp focus. This is an EASY hack trick for anyone with a little experience in photography and a dSLR.

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What you are trying to control, when taking this kind of photo, is called DEPTH OF FIELD.

Depth of Field is simply how much of a photograph will be in focus and how much will be out of focus. More depth of field gets you more of the photo in focus, less gets you what you are looking for when you want a blurry background.

So! Now that we know what its called – how do we do it?

One of the 4 main factors you can control in photography is the APERTURE of the lens you are shooting with (on dSLRs anyways, on a point and shoot you are generally SOL.) The aperture is like the pupil of your eye – it opens and closes to let in more or less light! A wide open aperture lets in more light but also has a shallower DOF. The wider you open the aperture, the less of the photo will be in focus.  It is possible to take a picture of someone and get their nose in focus and their eyes, just a centimeter or so behind them out of focus.

The out of focus areas are blurred into polygonal shapes that correspond directly to the shape of the aperture. As apertures are not perfect circles but rather a set of blades, the shape of these blades determines if you get nice creamy blurs or hard, harsh ones. The Japanese call this effect “bokeh.”

So – to get a picture with soft focus like this put your dSLR in Aperture Priority Mode, open the aperture way up, focus and fireaway.

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It is that easy.