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How to Create Those Amazing Blurred Background Photo Portraits
How do professional photographers make those stunning c as well as id portraits, where the subject is in perfect focus but the background is a blur?
- Use a camera with a large imaging plate/chip, such as a 35mm film camera.
- Use a "fast" lens, that is, a lens with a maximum aperture (opening) of f2.8 or larger. Large apertures, in conjunction with the imaging size, provide very shallow depths of field, that is, they blur the area in front of as well as behind the subject.
- Fill the frame (head as well as shoulders) with the subject.
- Focus on the eyes.
- Shoot a series of images with the lens wide-open as well as stopped down one or two stops. Noses, ears as well as hair will be in varying degrees of focus. By shooting at various apertures, you'll get to choose the most pleasing image.
- To make as shallow a depth of field as possible, use a long/telephoto lens set on maximum zoom. St as well as as close to the subject as possible, however, if you have a very long lens, this might still be quite far away. as well as get as close as possible to your subject.
- If the subject is moving, such as the car in the picture below, you must move the camera to follow the subject. Consider using fast film or setting your digital SLR on a fast ISO setting. Keep your body as well as the camera as steady as possible, track the subject through the viewfinder as well as ensure your camera is focusing properly on the subject, as well as take the photo. This technique uses the blurred background to highlight the motion of the subject, whereas background blurred solely through a shallow depth of field is used to make the subject st as well as out from its surroundings.
- Alternatively you can use Photoshop, select the background as well as use the Blur filter. However, this Photoshop technique does not create true depth as it blurs everything in the background uniformly rather than independently based on distance from the lense. An image blurred "in camera" collects visual information from a scene that a PhotoShop blurred image can never obtain because the data is not there in a PhotoShop file, thereby making the "in camera" image a much truer as well as organic image/record.
- If you are using Photoshop CS2 it now offers a 'smart blur' option in the filters sections un blur. The filter takes into account the depth of field as well as prospective as well as applies more blurring to pixels it interprets as farther away as well as less to pixels percieved as closer to the subject. The filter is also adjustable so it is better to gradually add the effect until you have the look desired
- Because of their small imaging plane/chip size, point- as well as -shoot film (110's with 13 x 17mm imaging size, or Super 8, etc.) as well as digital video as well as still cameras (1/3" imaging chip) have difficulty achieving these results. Choose a 35mm film SLR camera (24 x 36 mm imaging size for st as well as ard still photography), a digital SLR camera, or a professional video camera (2/3" imaging chip) as well as equip it with the kind of lens described above. With some long zoom point- as well as -shoot cameras (6x-12x) you can still get a background blur even without an expensive SLR.
- This effect is caused by a shallow depth of field. Other than imaging size as well as wide aperture (f1.8 - 2.8) there are other factors that affect the depth of field, including; (a) Focal length of lens (b) Distance from your subject.
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Added: Thu Feb 02 2006
