How do I blur the background?

Photographer: Al Jurina
 Reader Q&A

I am going to do my best at trying to answer this question without going into a long explanation of things, but there are actually several factors that affect whether a background is blurry or not. For today, I will discuss the more popular one: Aperture.

Aperture is the size of the opening inside of your lens. The aperture lets in light the wider it gets, but the trade-off is that the wider it gets, the shallower your depth-of-field (DOF) becomes.

Cameras and photographers know aperture in a measurement known as an F-stop. This measurement can be controlled on some cameras, so that you can set it to a wide aperture. The smaller the F-Stop number, the wider the aperture. The wider the aperture, the shallower your DOF which gives you a blurry background.

Unfortunately, many cameras don't come with lenses that have an aperture that can go very wide. The standard kit lens opens up to about F/3.5 or F/5.6. This is not very wide compared to an aperture of F/2.8 or F/1.4, which are REALLY wide. These kinds of aperture settings are what the pros use when they want to get nice out-of-focus backgrounds.

For now, if you would like to get a blurry background, try these following tips:

1. Read your manual to learn how to adjust your camera's aperture to it's widest setting (smallest number possible)

2. Get close to your subject and try to put a lot of distance between your subject and what is behind it (for instance, move a person close to your camera, but have the brick wall behind them much further away from them). For the above picture with the shell, I actually zoomed in really close with a kit lens, so it is possible to get a blurred background with just a standard kit lens.

3. Use a long focal length by zooming as far in as you can on your subject.

In a future post, we will try to cover aperture and how it works in more depth, but hopefully this post will get you started on making those appealing blurry backgrounds.

If you have a question about photography, please let us know and we will try to answer it here on the blog for you.

Now, go and practice!

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