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It is also important to pay attention to the kind of background behind your subject. In the following example, the only change to the second shot was moving the background half the distance to the subject: Both shots at identical camera settings the only difference is that the background is twice as far away in the first shot If you want blurred backgrounds with wildlife photography, you should pay attention to the background and shoot at different angles to avoid close background elements. In the following shot, the House Finch was fairly close to me, while the background was a forest behind a river in the distance: House Finch.

Keeping the background as far as possible is one of the best ways to create a blurred background.

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Panasonic G9 + Laowa f/2.8 Ultra Macro 50mm, ISO 500, 1/400, f/7.1 Keep the Background Far Away Macro photography usually has blurry backgrounds because you need to be so close to your subject. Or, if you are a wildlife photographer and you are about to photograph a King Cobra, you may not want to get very close at all. Portrait photographers have to be especially sensitive to perspective, since getting too close to a human face will accentuate closer features like the nose. Besides that, getting closer completely changes composition and perspective. It exaggerates issues like camera shake and missed focus, making it harder to take sharper photos. Of course, getting closer also brings its own disadvantages. Let us see what happens if we move in closer, keeping other settings the same: Both of these shots were taken at 50mm at f/6.3, but I moved in much closer for the second It is a good technique to use when you don’t have a fast lens.

The famous war photographer Robert Capa once said, “If your photographs aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” As it so happens, aside from often making photographs better, getting closer to your subject also increases background blur.

Panasonic G9 + Laowa f/2.8X Ultra Macro 50mm, ISO 500, 1/125, f/2.8 Get Closer A relatively wide aperture of f/2.8 helps create this smooth background. Likewise for the newest 50mm f/1.8 primes from Canon, Sony, and others. For example, I was often hesitant to shoot the Nikon 50mm f/1.8G at f/1.8, whereas I would have no such hesitation with the Nikon 50mm f/1.8 S for Nikon Z cameras. Furthermore, as shown many times on Photography Life, a lens near its maximum aperture often exhibits less sharpness and more aberrations.Ī loss of sharpness at wide apertures is often the case with very fast portrait lenses, although recent designs are much better in this regard. Why is this? For one, the depth of field may be too shallow at wider apertures to cover your subject, even if you otherwise like how the blurry background looks. However, opening up your aperture wider is not always desirable, even if you’re after a blurred background. Such lenses can be more expensive than their counterparts, but you should be able to find some inexpensive f/1.8 or f/2 prime lenses for almost any camera out there. This means that “fast” lenses like f/1.4 primes and f/2.8 zooms have an advantage if this is your goal. Let us look at four photos at different apertures to see this effect: Four photos at 50mm with the same framing but different aperturesĪs you can see, wider apertures like f/1.8 and f/2.8 are preferable for creating smoother, blurrier backgrounds. All else being equal, a wider aperture gives a more blurred background. It is specified by the f-number, like f/2.8, which is the ratio of the lens’s focal length to the visible size of the adjustable opening. A lens’s aperture is the adjustable opening that controls how much light enters the lens.

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