What is Bokeh Effect Photography? How to take a simple Bokeh photo with a camera

For those who are passionate about photography, the Bokeh effect must be no stranger because it brings sparkling and vivid pictures, very interesting. This article will explain to you what this effect is and how to take simple bokeh photos with the camera.

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What is the Bokeh Effect?

Bokeh is a fairly common photography technique, taking the low-intensity light of pine tree lights or lights from afar to create a soft, shimmering, fanciful background, making the photo become artistic and make the photo look artistic. more prominent subject in focus.

Bokeh comes from a Japanese word that means the feeling of a blurred area, but Bokeh’s speciality is in the quality of the blurs being deliberately placed, creating shaped shadows. uniform and beautiful.

The Bokeh effect in photography is the quality of the entire area out of focus. Thus, Bokeh is the opposite of sharpness: sharpness happens at the best point of focus, Bokeh is what happens outside of those best points of focus.

What are good Bokeh photos?

A photo with good Bokeh will make the subject in focus stand out and be very dramatic, to do this the blurred background appears soft with well-lit shadows and no hard edges, between Blurred areas have nice and harmonious transitions.

Besides the background does not make people feel confused, not sharp and the ghosts are not sharp, the focus image still ensures a sharp display, not blurred according to the background.

How to take good bokeh photos

Open large lens aperture

Setting the aperture on the camera to be smaller than f/2 for better exposure is one of the common ways to get a good Bokeh photo. For a portrait or a subject, the aperture should be at f/1.4 or f/1.2 .

Setting the lens aperture to the smallest number will help reduce the depth of field, thereby reducing the sharp area against the background.

Reduce the distance between the subject and the camera

Camera lenses work according to our naked eye: for objects close to the eye will be clear and objects far away will be blurred. Therefore, the closer you are to the subject, the more blurred the background will be and the easier it will be to create the Bokeh effect.

Increase the distance between the subject and the background

Based on the principle described above, if the subject is placed too close to the background, it is clear that the background will be more difficult to blur. Increasing the distance between the subject and the should solves this problem.

This is based on the variation of depth of field: depth of field is not a clear boundary, it varies from sharp to faded in an image.

Use a lens with a long focal length

A camera lens with a focal length of 135mm will obviously give a better image quality Bokeh than a 35mm lens.

Besides, with a lens with a long focal length, the photographer does not need to change the distance between the subject and the background to still be able to capture a good series of Bokeh photos.

So if you have a lens with a long focal length, adjust the focal length as long as possible, increasing the focal length of the lens will help increase the depth of field.

Use a lens with a large aperture

A lens with a large maximum aperture will help the camera catch light quickly, the shutter speed will also become faster and produce quality and beautiful Bokeh photos.

If using Nikon, you can choose lenses such as: Nikon 50mm f/1.4 , Nikon 85mm f/1.4 and Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8. These are all lenses with large maximum apertures and are optically optimized for portraiture.

Focus distance

Take photos close to the subject, but do not stand too close to the minimum distance that the camera lens allows. You can check the distance of each type of lens on Google to know exactly.

The right lighting conditions

Even though the appropriate lens is used, the background light is not satisfactory, which also significantly affects the quality of the Bokeh image. A background that is too bright can drown out and make the subject appear blurry, so always make sure that the subject is the brightest in the frame.

Besides, if there is too much shadow of the light around the subject, it will cause distraction. Therefore, the light should be properly distributed in each different condition.

Bokeh photo editing with Photoshop

Using Photoshop to blend colors and adjust the depth of field of Bokeh photos will also support the effect on the image to be more beautiful and harmonious.

Two suggested software, Lightroom and Camera Raw on Photoshop, will make it easier for you to edit your photos to become more sparkling.

Above is an article that introduces the Bokeh effect in photography and how to take simple bokeh photos with the camera. Hope this article provides you with useful information!