Beautiful Bokeh

One thing that has always been able to draw my attention to a photo is beautiful bokeh (bo-kuh). Bokeh is the bits of light in the background of a photo that are out of focus and create a pretty pattern. 

This series of photos was taken using my 70-300mm lens. I'll admit that lens isn't the first thing I think to grab when taking a photo (mostly because I am so in love with my 50mm's low light capabilities) but I am very impressed with it. 

Creating beautiful bokeh can be achieved in three easy steps. 

1. Find the light and frame your subject accordingly. This is super important as first, you need the light to have a properly exposed photo and secondly, it's hard to create bokeh when there aren't any pops of color or light in the background. Bokeh is all about adding interest to a photo so look for light coming through leaves or string of lights a little ways off. 

2. Figure out what your len's smallest aperture is and change it to that. My 70-300mm lens has a variable aperture which means that as I zoom it out, the lens changes it's aperture automatically. It ranges from 4-5.6 so when I was zoomed out to 300mm to take the photos of the flowers on the clothesline, my aperture was 5.6. My beloved 50mm lens however, has a fixed aperture so it's smallest is 1.8 and it will stay there until I change it again. 

3. Use the maximum zoom on your lens. This creates an optical illusion that will help details in the background appear larger even though they haven't gotten any closer.  Here is an excellent article that explains it much better. 

Now that you know what bokeh is and have read about how to create it, go try to make some of your own. Experiment with different apertures and note what it does to the background. Find the perfect amount of bokeh that works for you. As you can see, I'm a huge fan of super soft and creamy looking bokeh in my images but who knows! Maybe next week that will change. :)  Send me a comment with a link to your own bokeh experiments! I'd love to see them.