How to get that blurry background?

[magicsomething]

Hello! I got a camera last year, but haven't use it a lot, I have been reading tons of things on exposure and different settings, but still I try to focus a flower and hope the rest get blurry as in those macro shots, but it never works lol

Has anyone experiment on it and get good results?
What lens you use?

Thank you for reading!

[estación seca]

The basic idea is that the smaller the opening for light, the more things in both the foreground and the background are in focus. This works for lenses and for your eye. With lenses the opening is called the aperture or the F-stop. Note that the larger the number on the camera, the smaller the aperture, because it is an inverse ratio. So an F-stop of F/5.4 has a larger aperture than an F-stop of F/22.

The larger the aperture, the blurrier the background, and the narrower is the plane that is in focus. This holds true no matter what type of lens.

If you don't have specialized lenses, try and take the photo with the largest aperture for your lens that is possible with the light. Many cameras allow you to turn off the automatic setting and set a fixed aperture. It will help immensely if you use a tripod or camera stand. The larger aperture will tend to blur the background.

Lenses designed for close-up photographs usually have a very narrow depth of field. This means only a thin plane perpendicular to the lens is in focus, and everything else is blurry. It can be hard to photograph even a very small flower with one of these lenses and have the whole thing in focus. The brighter the light, and the smaller the aperture of a close-up lens, the more will be in focus. Many people take extreme close-ups with very bright supplemental lighting and a small aperture for the lens. Without extra light the photos are underexposed.

People also use software to assemble close-up photos with a great depth of field. They set the camera on a tripod and often use a controller to trigger the camera. They take a series of photos at slightly different lens apertures, then feed the photos into the software. The software takes just the narrow ring that is in perfect focus from each photo, and assembles these slices into one finished image.

There are a lot of good tutorials online about taking photos. I seem to recall there were some at Kodak and also at National Geographic. I saw some at Nikon a while ago, but they were very technical and transliterated directly from Japanese into English, so they were not the easiest to follow. Maybe it's different now.

[chidlove]

Originally Posted by magicsomething

Hello! I got a camera last year, but haven't use it a lot, I have been reading tons of things on exposure and different settings, but still I try to focus a flower and hope the rest get blurry as in those macro shots, but it never works lol

Has anyone experiment on it and get good results?
What lens you use?

Thank you for reading!

Hello,

Congrats on your camera Blurred back ground can be done a couple of ways . If your aperture [f stop no.] is 1.8 to 5.6 , you focus on your flower, and your bg should be nicely blurred. Also, you could place your flower quite far from your bg,and focus on the flower. It should blur the bg.

Hope this helps

[tropterrarium]

estacion seca gave a very nice overview. I may add, that macrolenses do not have different optical principles with respect to depth of field. They just can focus closer and the larger magnification automatically means less depth of field (in mm) at same f-stop set on lens. [There are several differences between a macro and a non-macro lens, but not with respect to what DOF is obtained at same f-stop].

There are two more factors to consider:
- Physical separation of foreground and background. The more they are separated, the more the background will be out of focus.
- Focal length of lens. Long telephoto lenses have much shallower depth of field than wide angles. That is what all those giant telephoto lenses are about.

I also suggest to turn off all the auto functions and take pictures of the same plant/flower/object with all sorts of different settings in full manual mode. You will learn a lot of what is going on.

I assume you are using an dSLR, given that you ask which lens the rest of us are using, which implies interchangeable lenses. For most plant photography, I use a Zeiss Makroplanar 100 mm ZE, so a dedicated macro lens. The second most frequent lens I use for small flowers is the Canon MP-E 65 mm. A very specialized lens for serious macro from 1:1 to 5:1. I shoot on a Canon 5DsR. Please note, I am at the lunatic fringe of plant photographers. I also have two microscopes (stereo and compound) and run a scanning electron microscopy facility. You can get perfectly good images with less specialized equipment. Learn to use your current set-up well, then gear up. Also consider that a lot of good PHOTO-graphy has to do with light and lighting. Learning to shape light with diffusors and reflectors is possibly much more important for good flower images. An excellent book on that is Hunger & Fuqua: Light: Science and Magic.

On Friday at noon I will give a talk at the US Botanical Garden in Washington DC on photographing small flowers. Same talk this coming Monday night at National Capital Orchid Society.

Have fun exploring your newish camera!

[silken]

When I first started getting serious about using my DSLR, I bought this book: https://www.amazon.ca/Understanding-...stand+exposure It covers all aspects of the controls on a DSLR camera and how to use them. The author has a knack for explaining things simply and illustrating his point with photos. I found it the best beginner photography tutorial and I have read a few. Understanding how the camera works is the best way to start getting better photos.

[magicsomething]

God! I want to go! Are you guys uploading the talk somewhere? Or are going to stream it?

Okay I did a test yesterday with lights (I was holding the camera with one hand and a lamp with the other lol)
But there was tons of noise. I take tons of pics and upload 5 but they aren't on my blog yet.

Here's the link:
Wolf's Stuff

I also have some older pictures there.
I was using a 55mm lens...
I guess I was too close, just notice the lens say on the manual they have a minimun distance to be used... Is true... Right?

[nicola]

Hi,
the background out of focus, in photographic terms is called bokeh.
The maximum aperture of the lens, is the key to obtain soft blurs.
Ideally you should use a lens with at least f / 2.8 or better f / 1.2 to get good results.
Unfortunately lenses with these characteristics are more expensive.
Set your camera on auto with aperture priority, select the maximum aperture (smallest number) and go.
The minimum focusing distance is determined by the optical design, but it is possible to transform a normal lens into a macro, by adding additional lenses that are screwed in front like a filter.
Ciao Nicola

[tropterrarium]

55 mm lens? If this is the focal length, then there are not too many options, such as Micronikkor 55 mm, and very unlikely Zeiss Otus 55 mm (costs about $4K). However, 55 mm is also a filter diameter, and I wonder whether you may got the two confused.

The Micronikkor is a very nice macro lens, if that is the case.

Re handholding, not a good idea, particularly when you start out and try to understand how it all works. A tripod may be an excellent investment.

Re talk, don't think it is streamed or cast in any way. It's also a bit more geared towards small flower, so from macrophotography to stereo-/compound-microscopes, lots of z-stacking, and a bit of electron microscopy.
Below a link to the announcement
https://www.usbg.gov/events/2016/02/...-small-flowers
Those flowers are about 1.5 mm tall.
NCOS apparently hasn't updated website in a while ...

Try to find a local camera club and get some ideas and feedback there.

[silken]

50 or 55mm is just an average lens focal length that comes with many cameras as the kit lens. It should be a longer focal length to really get nice bokeh. 50mm is approx. what the human eye sees and that is fairly wide angle. 28mm is a proper wide angle but 55 covers a lot also. Try a 105mm lens or a zoom lens with a longer focal length and as mentioned by others a wide aperture to have less in focus. Also if you have autofocus settings, either turn them off or set it to a small focal area rather than a larger one.

[estación seca]

There are some photography videos at

B&H Photo and Video

I also clicked on Photography and paged through the Composition & Technique section and saw several dealing with taking flowers.