How to shoot a blurred background effect with a mobile phone?

In portrait photography, many people like portraits with blurred backgrounds. So how was this photo taken? In fact, it is not difficult to take a photo with a blurred background. Mainly grasp the relationship between aperture, focal length and shooting distance. Let's take a look together.

(Portrait work with blurred background)

First, how to determine the depth of field

The concept of depth of field has been introduced in the previous chapter. When shooting any object, we must focus first, and then trigger the shutter when the focus is "real". Then, when the object is in sharp focus, in fact, a certain distance in front of the object and a certain distance from the object to its rear are quite clear. Generally speaking, we call the distance or depth of this clear range before and after the depth of field.

(Control of Depth of Field in Portrait Shooting)

In photography and portrait photography, we need to determine the depth of field according to the theme and intention of shooting. For example, taking a commemorative photo requires not only that the characters are clear, but also that the flowers in front of the characters and the background behind them are clearly recorded to tell the audience how they feel about coming here, which requires shooting with depth of field. For example, shooting a table tennis player to catch the ball can also include the audience behind the player in the whole shooting picture, so at this time, in order to highlight the object to be photographed,

Second, three methods to master the blurred background of depth of field

Next, let's talk about three factors that affect the depth of field and their application in portrait photography.

First, the larger the aperture value of the lens, the shallower (smaller) the depth of field. For example, a photographer uses a large aperture such as F 1.8, so that the characters are in the clear range of depth of field, while the background is out of the clear range of depth of field, which makes the background completely blurred, thus effectively highlighting the characters in our picture.

(Large aperture realizes shallow depth of field and blurs background)

Second, the longer the focal length of the lens, the shallower the depth of field. If two lenses with different focal lengths use the same aperture size and the same shooting distance as the subject, the photos taken by the lens with longer focal length will have a shallow depth of field.

(The large aperture of telephoto lens can blur the background well)

In this portrait photography, the photographer recorded a beautiful model with a telephoto lens. It can be clearly seen that the telephoto lens and large aperture can blur the background environment of the characters, thus completing the blurring of the background and highlighting the main body of the characters we shot.

(The shorter the shooting distance, the shallower the depth of field, thus blurring the background.)

Third, the closer the lens is to the subject, the shallower the depth of field. If the focal length and aperture of the two lenses are the same, then in this case, the depth of field is related to the last factor, that is, the shooting distance between the lens and the subject, which is called "shooting distance" for short. If the shooting distance is short, the depth of field will be shallow, otherwise, the depth of field will be large.

A professional portrait photographer should not only control the depth of field and blur the background with the three methods mentioned above, but also pay attention to the selection of the background of the characters. Although the objects outside the depth of field are blurred, the general outline and color of the objects will affect our subjects more or less. Therefore, it is very important to choose a clean background that conforms to the shooting theme, and it is also an important yardstick to measure whether a person is professional as a photographer.

Here are three techniques to control the depth of field of portrait masterpieces, hoping to help and inspire everyone when they encounter shooting bottlenecks. In many cases, in order to get photos with blurred background and prominent people, these methods are often used comprehensively to achieve the most ideal effect.