Photography Tip Tuesday: Depth of Field aka That Blurry Background

Hey y’all! We are back with another installment of Photography Tip Tuesday.  Today Deeana from Deeana Kourtney Photography is going to give us a little lesson on how to achieve a good depth of field AKA creating that soft, blurry background that style bloggers just love.  With that, I will let Deeana take it away!!

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Hi guys – today we’re going to talk about controlling your aperture and getting a shallow depth of field. I’m sure you all have seen that tack sharp image of a subject and the background has a really pretty blur (that blur is called bokeh if you want to get techy) and you were wondering to yourself “How can I do that?” Well, I’m here to help – it’s actually pretty simple!

A basic definition of of depth of field is: the zone of acceptable sharpness within a photo that will appear in focus. In every picture there is a certain area of your imagine in front of, and behind the subject that will appear in focus. Your depth of field is controlled by changing your aperture, which is that f – number that we touched based on in the our post last week you can find that here. The lower the f – number the more shallow your depth of field is (creates a greater blur in the background) and the higher the f – number the more sharp the entire image will be (less blur in the background). Another thing that will effect how much blur you can create in the back ground is the distance the subject is from the camera. The closer the subject is to the camera the shallower the depth of field becomes, meaning you’ll be able to create more of a blur in the background. Moving further away from the subject will deepen your depth of field, which means your subject will stand out less and the blur will not be as great, but you will have an entire image that will be sharp. Below is an example of you how the depth of field changes depending on where the subject is in relation to the camera. In the example below the settings are exactly the same with the same f – number.

Now, there is one downfall when changing your f – number (your aperture) to a really low number – the lower that number is, the more room for error when focusing. You must make sure your hand is steady and you are always focusing on your subjects eyes, always be sure your subjects eyes are in focus! The picture on the left if you look closely her face is not entirely in focus, her eyes are not sharp, but the picture on the right if you look closely her eyes are perfectly in focus.

Ok, so now lets recap what we know. A shallow depth of field (Dof) creates a picture that has a subject that stands out in focus with a blurry background. Changing your aperture is how you create a shallow depth of field – and your aperture is that little f – number on the back of your camera – the lower the f – number the more shallow your depth of field is! Lastly, every time you change that f – number don’t forget about the exposure triangle, that we learned about last week and if you change your f – number to a lower number you will need to make your shutter speed a higher number. If you missed last weeks lesson on the exposure triangle read it here.  (FYI- for the pictures above the f-stop is 1.8)
Go pick up that camera, find a model (a dog, a cat, a husband, a diet coke, anything will work!) and start playing with those numbers and see how many different looks you can get by simply changing your aperture and changing your distance between you and your subject. Be sure to leave us any questions below!

xo,

Deeana & Bess