In this video I have a look at the basics of getting great bokeh. Adorama TV
presents Take and Make Great Photography with Gavin Hoey. Hello I'm Gavin Hoey
and you are watching Adorama TV. Brought to you by Adorama, the camera store that has everything for us
photographers. In this video I'm going to show you that by combining a light bulb and some
Christmas lights you can learn an awful lot about photography. And with a bit of luck, you can
even take a great picture along the way.
Ok, let's get going. So I've got the Christmas lights on a lovely red festive
background. That looks great. Camera set up in aperture priority mode f8.
Let's take a picture and when I do, you can see, I've got a perfectly exposed picture,
that's in focus. It's not very exciting, let's change a few things and get things more
interesting. I'm going to come to the lens and switch off auto focus and go for manual
focus instead, and then I'm going to deliberately put this out of focus by
setting it as close to the front of the lens as I can,
which apparently is about 20 centimeters on this lens and take the same shot.
Now you'd think this is going to come out blurry but when you look at the picture
those little points of light
well then now shapes of light, so what's going on here?
Well that's down to the f8 aperture, if you look at it there are seven sides
to the shape. It's a heptagon and that's caused by these seven blades in
this lens when you use f8 aperture, they stop down, they close down the lens
and that's the shape of the blades. So what would happen then, if I use rather than f8,
lets go for for F 2.8, which is the fastest I can choose on this lens that
means my shutter speed goes up but also their shape changes no longer are they heptagons,
they are now more or less round,
when I use f2.8, it is the wide open aperture you may have heard that
term, the blades of the aperture in the lens, well they don't close down, wide-open
gives me the shape of the barrel of the lens - round. They're also much. much bigger
aren't they, much larger than the f8 that's because f2.8 well that's a bigger
aperture than f8. F8 is a smaller aperture again these are terms you may
have heard of, and when you look at them like this, they kind of makes sense. Ok so
that some basic photographic terms explained but what are these little blurry
circles and shapes of light? They are known as bokeh. Well at least that's what I call them,
you can call them something very similar, there are other names that sound more or
less the same. Whatever you call them they are fantastic and ifyou know how to use
them in your photography, they can really elevate it. What this picture really needs, is a
foreground subject, and I got one right here this. This just your ordinary
household light bulb, it doesn't have to be in a fancy bulb holder like this, but you
know what I kind of like that, that's just pure fun. Right, things that do matter
however, well there are about four things that matter to get really good bokeh. The
first one is the distance between the background lights, and your subject.
Basically bigger is better,
however, it's not set in stone when you change this gap you will change the effects.
So experimentation is the key here. Camera settings well, there a little bit more
predictable. First of all you want to go for a long lens. You want to have it nice
and zoomed in on my lens here - 40 millimetres is the maximum zoom this is
a Micro four thirds camera, if it was a full frame that's equivalent to 80
millimetres that's a good place to start. Next to the gap between the subject and
the lens, you want to have that as small as possible. Get in close, obviously
maintaining the framing of your shot.
Finally, it's the obvious one. The aperture, you want to use wide open for your lens, and
that's going to vary from the lens to lens. This one f2.8. So lets dial in f2.8, check
focus. I'm focusing on the glass
the middle of my light bulb and take the shot. Now that works really well, I've got a
lovely bokeh background. I can see the bulb it all makes sense.
Trouble is the bulb looks a bit silhouette really, doesn't it?
That's cause it's not turned on. Obvious how silly. Lets just turn the light on and take
the same shot again. Ok, here we go. This time, well that's not what I wanted either. Now
I've got a great shot of a lit bulb, but what happen to the background? It's
completely gone I can just about to make out some bits there.
Well what's happening here, is that the bulb is really bright the camera is in
aperture priority mode. It sees a really bright bulb and says, oh I need to
increase my shutter speed.
Those background lights, well they haven't got any brighter, so they're not being recorded.
What I need to do, is balance things up and I can do that using a dimmer circuit here on the light.
So I can dim this down, let's get it as low as it goes, that should
help me to balance the brightness of the bulb with the brightness of the
background bokeh. And yes that looks like that's going to be brilliant. I can see
the bulbs lit, but I can also see my background. Of course with a slight
change of composition this will look even better, so let's just give everything a
bit of a twist to the side. Take the same shot again and that just adds bit more
excitement to the image. Now that looks really good, I'm pleased with that but of course
there's always something you can do in Photoshop, so let's take the picture from
the camera over into Photoshop and do a quick bit of editing there. As is so
often the case time spent in camera is rewarded here in Photoshop, with less to
do and that's always a good thing I think. However anything shiny, like a
glass bulb, well that's going to require some photoshop work because often it's
easier to remove reflections in Photoshop then in-camera depends on the
case in point. This one well you'll see the problem. At first glance this picture
looks fantastic I love exactly how it came off the camera. It looks great and then
I looked a little bit closer,
and I could see this and this is a reflection of the filament of the bulb.
It's just a little bit distracting, so what I did was, I went back through my
pictures and I also had this shot as well and this is with the bulb unlit, turned off.
So all I am going to do is, go to select and all, and edit and copy back to the main
picture. Edit and paste that'll put the two pictures on top of each other. Now
they fit absolutely perfectly and this is one of the big advantages of always
taking that extra shot you hadn't planned on. Doing an unlit bulb shot at the end of
the video I thought I had the shot nailed down and then I thought well let's just
take one or two more, you never know. And this is one of those pictures that saved me
a ton of time and gives me a really great result too. So I've got the unlit bulb over the
lit bulb, I'm going to merge them together by using layers. So let's come up to the
layout on the menu bar at the top. Then I'm going to come down to layer mask and
then across and down to hide all and this will stop that layer that I've just
pasted on being visible by making a layer mask that this black rectangle
here, and black means well you can't see through it you see the layer below
instead. So that's fine. How does that help me remove this bit. Well if I get a
paintbrush and make sure my paintbrush is white. If it's black, just click on the
little arrows, and that will get you at the white one, and then if I use a nice
small brush. Because these are perfectly aligned they should allow me to just paint
and mask away the area I want to remove. I could of course do this with
cloning. But it's just that much more neat and better-looking by using the
real shot itself. Now this really is the shot, if I had to go over a bit that's wrong, well them
you can see, I can bring back the unlit filament. So if you go wrong, you swap to
the black color, and you can return it and restore it like that. Now I do have to
watch out, because this is a slightly different. With that filament on, it's about a third
of a stop brighter, so if I need any areas like that, I'll use a much
bigger brush, cause that will have a nice soft edge, and that will allow me, just to feather in the edge and
give me a very, very, convincing and neat shot without any of those horrible
reflections and there is my final picture completed. Noe you have learnt the basic to bokeh I'm
going to take that knowledge and move forward with my next video where we
are going to do some advanced techniques using the same basic setup. Of course if you want to see it, click
on the subscribe button, and that way you get to see the rest of the videos from
the other amazing presenters right here on AdoramaTV. I'm Gavin Hoey and thanks for watching.
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