Hi I'm Doug McKinlay for AdoramaTV.
Superb, beautiful, smooth, silky and
flawless. These are just some of the
superlatives used by photographers when
discussing one of photography's
best devices.
What is it?
It's bokeh,
an out-of-focus quality of an image
usually obtained by fast lenses.
Now the term bokeh is just the japanese
word for blur.
Back in the day it was
just background blur.
When shooting portraits
use a smaller aperture
to try and get a little bit of blur behind
your subject to separate them
from that background,
however with bokeh we're looking
at shards of light in behind
your subject, nicely, softly focused as well
and that's the difference between the two.
Simply it's those spheres of light
in a soft focus setting
that gives us the bokeh
but how do we achieve this bokeh
you might ask?
Well surprisingly not that hard.
We want to start with a fast lens
ideally an f/1.4, f/1.8 or f/2.8 even
and these are usually the fast primes
usually in the range of 21mm to 85mm
but if you don't have one of these lenses
don't fret.
We have a hack for that.
Now it's the shape of the diaphragm blades
in your lens that creates the shape
of the bokeh.
Lenses with circular diaphragm blades
will create circular points of light.
Lenses with octagonal or hexagonal blades
will create shapes following those patterns.
Now once you've chosen your lens
for us it's a 24mm f/1.4
you're almost ready to go.
Now with these short prime lenses we
want to get quite close to our subject.
With our points of light for our bokeh
about twice the distance in the background.
I'm also using a tripod
because I want everything to be stable
but I also want to make sure
my focus is exact.
Now when we're shooting at f/1.4 or f/1.8 or even f/2,
the focus is going to be very narrow.
So it doesn't take much body movements
to throw the focus out,
so you're going to get a better focus
if you're mounted to a pod.
If needs be use a cable release.
Now when you first start to do this kind of stuff
what I suggest you do is
you set yourself up
and then you shoot through the range of f-stops,
from f/1.4 or f/2.8 up to f/8 or even f/11
that way you've got a series of images
and then when you review them,
you can see how that aperture changes
and the Bokeh changes behind it.
It's a very good exercise.
Now I primarily work in the great outdoors
so I'm at the mercy of the light around me.
Now ideally when I'm doing pictures
where I want to put, include a bit of natural bokeh,
I'm looking for places where
that Sun is going to create little hotspots
behind my subject,
so you have to sort of scout around
a little bit and maybe wait for
the time of day to be right for you.
I find it works better when the Sun
is directly overhead
and creates those hotspots behind your subject.
Now don't forget with these kind of images
whether you're shooting people or nature
sometimes a little bit of fill in flash
really helps lift the picture.
It can actually help you create
that three-dimensional sort of feel
to your image,
by separating your subject
from that background.
No matter how much you
try though, sometimes Mother Nature
does not want to cooperate.
Now the sky for us today right now
is starting to look a little bit flat
and boring and we're losing a bit of light
but I brought along a string of lights
to help us out
with this demonstration.
Now these are just a string of old Christmas lights
and we're going to use these
by stringing them up in the tree
and we'll use these as our points of light.
Now I've also brought along
with these lights a handful
of clothes pegs,
somewhere in my pocket,
just back garden clothes pegs,.
You can use alligator clips or crocodile grips
or whatever whatever
you've got and we're going to string
the set of lights in the tree behind
what's going to be our subject.
I'm going to use this leaf for just for demonstration
purposes only
and we'll see if we can get some nice points of light
in our couple of images.
So we'll do that now.
So as you can see we've got our string of
lights in our in our little tree branch
behind my subject which is this leaf
at the moment and I'm going to set
the lens at f/1.4,
so I've got a large aperture
and it should throw the points of light
into little specks of bokeh
and I'm making sure that the distance between
the subject and the lights
is about double the distance between myself
and the subject.
Now one other thing I'll just
mention here, I know earlier
we're talking about the tripod,
well I'm getting a pretty fast shutter speed
so at the moment I'm probably okay
without the pod.
Keeping in mind though I've got to keep
perfectly still so I don't want that
focus coming in and out
with a very, very, very narrow depth of field.
Now I'm looking in the back of the camera
and I'm just seeing that my points of light
are looking quite distant
because I'm using a 24mm lens.
Earlier we talked about a hack
if you don't have a lens that's that's super fast.
If your lens is f/5 6 or f/8
usually there would be longer lenses
zooms or telephotos.
Now the hack basically is
that we have to stand further back
from our subject.
So we need to go back probably double
double the distance or more
in order to compress the picture
with the natural compression
that comes in with longer
lenses and that's our hack.
It works really well.
So we're going to do that now.
I've got a longer lens
on the on the camera
and I have put it on the tripod this time
because with the longer lens
it's going to be more difficult
from, you know, to hold it still
and get a good clear picture.
Now this lens is a f/2.8 lens
but I set it at f/5.6
just for demonstration purposes
and I'm going to get a shot of our subject
which is a leaf
and with those points of light in behind,
if you notice I'm further back
from the subject
therefore I'm compressing the picture
through the natural compressor
of the longer lens.
If the weather is just too bad
or you have no time to find a park or a forest
experimenting at home is a simple task too.
Use anything from kids toys to billiard balls
or even coffee cups as your subjects
and you can use that string of Lights
as your light source too.
Shooting in the evening or night,
in a city or town is a bit of a no-brainer
when it comes to bokeh images.
There are just tons of lights to use.
This is even more spectacular
around the holidays.
Now I've been banging on about
background bokeh for the last little while
but it can be just as effective as a creative device
if used in the foreground.
Same aperture rules apply
but instead of having a light source behind your subject,
we move it in front.
This can be naturally occurring light
or artificially introduced like
our string of lights.
You might need to play around with the perspective
a little but with trial and error,
you should get some nice images.
So that's it for our look at bokeh.
I'm Doug McKinlay for AdoramaTV.
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