How To Create Beautiful Bokeh

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Hey, it’s Jay P. here. We’re down in Hollywood. I’ve got Genevieve here with me. “Hi.” We’re going to take a look at how to create bokeh. It’s a great place to do it because there’s so many lights around us. We’ve joined 3 or 4 thousand of our closest friends from all over the United States who came here for a little better weather. So why not come down here and shoot bokeh? So bokeh really is a Japanese word that means haze or blur. But let’s look at just that beautiful bokeh, the round kind of out of focus light in the background. Let’s see how you can create it with different lenses. Let’s just see exactly what gives you the best bokeh. So let’s get started and see what we can do.

So there’s several principles that make getting bokeh really simple. Number one is shoot with a shallow aperture. If you’re at f/2.8 or even shallower then the background is going to fall out of focus much quicker and you’re going to get more beautiful bokeh. So if I’m at 200mm here and I shoot into those lights underneath the theater I get beautiful rows of bokeh back there. It’s just beautiful lights just all stacked up behind her because I’m at 200mm. And I’m very, very close to her. The closer I get to her the larger that bokeh is going to become.

So if I come in here it compresses the distance between her and the bokeh and the bokeh just becomes larger. If I go to 100mm I’ve got to get really close to her to get that same bokeh. So even at 100mm, and I’ve gotten closer to her and keeping her head about the same size, the bokeh pushes further back because of the perspective change. So the bokeh is not as large. So a longer lens is going to give you more bokeh more easily. F/2.8 on 100mm is very different than f/2.8 at 200mm when the head is the same size in the frame. It’s also a bit about the distance of the lights from the subject. That’s another principle. The closer they are to the subject the shallower you’re going to need the depth of field to be. But the larger the bokeh is going to become.

So even if I get really close with that 50mm lens the bokeh, the lights are so far back there it’s hard to create nice bokeh. I’d have to get really super close to the bokeh. So I’m going to change my distance here. I’m going to move in closer, get closer to those lights, so that 50mm will start to give me a better blur in the background. So I’ve gotten closer to those lights and I’m keeping her head the same size in the frame. But what’s happened is I’m so close to the lights now they’re not blurring.So even with that 50mm lens the lights are just too close to me. That’s the first kind of bokeh. It’s pinpoint lights.

Here’s a bokeh that I like even better and that is when I stand up I’m going to look down this street and all those lights, everything down there is going to turn into just a mush a beautiful kind of bokeh. So I’m going to do that right now. Look at that background. It’s just beautiful. Everything falls out of focus. It’s somewhat defined but it’s not overly defined. It’s just a beautiful, beautiful look. I love that type of bokeh where it just falls out of that haze. That blur just looks so amazing to me. I could shoot that all day long.

Now I’m going to go back to a longer lens. Look at that 100mm lens. Everything is just turning into this beautiful painterly background. This a beautiful look. If I go to 200mm I’m going to probably just get really, really, I’m going to cry I’m going to be so happy. Here we go. It is absolutely gorgeous. Just everything down there. All those lights just turn into a beautiful haze. It has a very painterly look. And I think it’s gorgeous. That’s the kind of bokeh I think is amazing. The pinpoint lights are great, you know, it reminds me of Christmas and Hallmark movies. But that kind of long look at just beautiful kind of soft lights turned into a gorgeous bokeh. That’s the stuff I think is amazing.

We had a young man show up in Reno. He’s dealing with some challenges in life and he came out the year before and he was only able to do the tower. He came out this year and he was able to get the whole way to the hose drag the first day. South Davis Metro in Utah agreed to run a relay with him. At the start line they were trying to figure out whose team he was running on and they were fighting over whose team, who got him. I can’t tell you how inspirational it was for everyone. One to just embrace this young man and allow him to feel that taste of victory. And team SKB is a great fit for firefighters because they’re a little rough these guys. So SKB is an excellent fit to keep anything they need to take care of safe.

So when I look back this direction I’m looking into all the lights of the cars that are coming towards me. And they’re far enough back there that they give me that kind of a cross between that really soft painterly lights bokeh and pinpoint lights. But they’re so far back they just turn into this beautiful kind of look. And it’s more high key, it’s just a beautiful look. So I’m going to shoot some of those at 200mm, 100mm, 50mm and just see what you think. So two things start to happen. When I’m on a 100mm lens it’s really a nice look at the face. When I go to 200mm it flattens the face a little bit. But when I go to 50mm and I get in close to match of the head size the face starts to elongate. The nose starts to elongate. It’s not the most flattering look for a face, especially that tight. So if you want a nice bokeh it’s better to stay around 85mm and above which I think is a nice look at the face and a nice look at the bokeh in the background. If you get to a 50mm that’s like an f/1.2. It can give you some beautiful bokeh as you shoot into that really wide open end of that 50mm. That’ll give you a great look.

So what I’m looking for is any kind of light sources, the car lights as they drive towards you. I love looking down a street because of all of those street lights and the cars. If you get on the side of the street where the cars are coming towards you it looks absolutely beautiful. I’m looking for the shop lights, any of the businesses, as I look down the street. Those are all going to create a really creamy, beautiful looking bokeh in the background. The deeper and further back there you can get the more beautiful it becomes. So any type of look. Julene just held her phone up. I saw this done once where a person had like 10 people hold their phones up behind the model and they took a picture. It had all this beautiful bokeh behind the model. So pinpoint light sources into deep light sources create beautiful bokeh. In fact I’m going to have a Genevieve move over here. I’m going to look way down the street. Come over a little more looking way down the street towards the, there we go, towards the street lights. Look at that. Look at that, that’s awesome. I can see street lights way down there. You see the red, you see the green. So as she walks towards me in the street it is so deep back there that everything just starts to blur around her and gives you beautiful bokeh, even in a full body shot. On a 200mm lens everything just falls beautifully out of focus. So it’s a beautiful look.

Why do I like bokeh? For several reasons. Number one is it creates a simple background. Because everything back there that I would see definition in, signs I would read, all that kind of stuff just goes blurry and goes out of focus and creates a beautiful soft out of focus background. Creates simplicity, a great composition principle in my image. Number two, it’s just beautiful. See how excited they are about the bokeh in my shot. They can’t hold it down.

This is the perfect lighting situation. We are in total open shade but there’s a bright spot in the sky where the sun’s going down. So if I look this way it’s going to give us beautiful light on her face. There’s a bright building on that end of the street that’s bouncing light back. So it’s going to give us beautiful light on her face. So I can shoot either direction. I can shoot almost in 360 here and it’s going to look gorgeous. It’ll last this way for 30 or 40 minutes. It’ll look wonderful. But then that building will probably die first. That bright sky will be the last to go. So I have to start looking back that direction as we go. It’s about the last hour and a half before the sun goes down. That’s the time to shoot. Then as the sun dims the brightness of all the street lights here become more pronounced. And the bokeh becomes more beautiful. So there’s my lighting situation. I love shooting in this right here. It’s a gorgeous time of day to shoot.

So as we’re walking down the street I’m looking for just pinpoint light sources. I’m looking for any kind of light reflections. There was a little place back here I looked right into. There’s rows of light. It looked beautiful. A little further down reflections of all of the billboards across the street were reflected in the glass of the windows. It gave a beautiful bokeh, a beautiful look. So I’m just looking for that as we walk down the street at different businesses. There’s different lighting and of course the light has gotten really nice right now. So everything kind of looks amazing. So that’s what we’re looking for.

So we just slipped inside this little hotel and they have all kinds of twinkle lights on the trees. I shot some shots of Genevieve there. I mean it just looks so Christmasy. It’s those pinpoint lights. It’s not my favorite look but it’s a beautiful look and people do it all the time using bokeh just created with twinkle lights. Use one of those nets you know so you have a kind of a nice pattern in the background for a portrait. That’s a great way to create bokeh in the studio. You can put that further or closer to the subject. That changes the size and how out of focus it is. So it’s a great way to get bokeh, it really is. But it doesn’t give you that really soft kind of depth that you get like shooting out on the street or something like that.

So let’s wrap this up. There’s some of the principles on how you can create bokeh, why you would create bokeh and where you can find good bokeh as you go around and shoot. It’s a wonderful experience. It gives you simple beautiful images and simple composition. I think it’s really a desirable way to shoot. So I hope you enjoyed this and you keep those cameras rollin’ and keep on clickin’!