Blurry backgrounds for creative effects at an engagement dinner
There are occasions where you turn up at a venue and find it to be a rather uninspiring place. A few weeks ago I was booked to shoot a very low key engagement dinner at an Indian restaurant in West London. When I arrived it was – how do I put it – rather bland upstairs, where the dinner was being held. What immediately caught my attention though were the fairy lights suspended in front of the glass window at the front of the restaurant.
One of the huge benefits of a full frame camera like the D700 combined with a wide aperture lens (i.e. one of f/2.8 or greater) is the ability to blur backgrounds with ease. More often than not the primary objective will be to remove distracting elements from your image by blurring them out, like when you’re out in the street and there are loads of people behind your subject. On occasion though, you can utilise the blur to emphasise your background without it becoming overly distracting.
I knew that the lights hanging in front of the window would make for a really nice blurry background, but there were a couple of caveats to this.
First off, I had to be at the widest aperture possible – so f/2.8 with my 24-70mm lens. The side effect of shooting with such a wide aperture is that you are left with a very shallow depth of field. The best way to get around this is to step back as much as possible and zoom out the lens to 70mm, since the further away you get from the subject, the more the depth of field around the focus point increases. Normally when shooting with a full frame camera I find that f/2.8 can work for two people so long as their eyes are on the same plane of focus. By zooming you also get a tighter perspective on the subjects than I would have gotten had I shot at less than 70mm.
A point to note here is that if you want more background blur, try moving closer to the subject:
The second issue was to do with reflections in the window, behind the fairy lights. I was using gelled bounce flash here, but shooting at a relatively high ISO (1600 – to capture the available light from the fairy lights) so the flash power was quite low. If the flash power had been any higher, far too much reflection would have shown up in the window. In fact, you can still see some of it around their heads, but it’s not massively distracting so I let it pass. If I had to do it again, I probably would have bounced the flash in a different direction entirely to try and avoid any reflection at all.
Here’s a shot which illustrates how a poorly managed reflection can ruin the image:
Now you may be wondering what the fairy lights looked like in real life. Here’s a photo of a large group of people, shot at f/8 (because you need a much wider depth of field for everyone to be in focus):
Yeah, that's Lee from Blue on the left.
Points to note:
- Be aware of the aperture you’re shooting at. For a shallower depth of field, you need to be shooting at a lower f number.
- If you are shooting more than one person, make sure their eyes are on the same plane if you want them both to be in focus.
- If you are shooting a group, it’s best to move up to f/8 or so. But be aware that this will mean your flash will need to chuck out more power and in turn that means a longer recycle time.
- If you are shooting in a venue that doesn’t have much going for it, look around for things that might look interesting when blurry. This can be tough, because your eyes don’t really see the world that way, but it works really well with a lot of different things like ceiling lights, neon, decorative items and large posters.
Here are a few more pics that show how framing against the lights can make a dull white room look pretty special:
