How to Take a Photo With a Shallow Depth of Field (Sharp Subject, Blurry Background)

One of the most useful tricks to creating a powerful focus is utilizing depth of field. By creating a shallow depth of field, you keep the viewer's eyes off the distracting background and focused in on exactly what you want them to see.

Most new photographers think about composing a subject in a frame in two dimensional terms - left and right. To separate your subject from their background, it's helpful to have as much physical distance as you can between the two. Taking a photo of a person standing miles in front of a mountain will make this much easier than a person standing three feet from the wall of a building. Shallow depth of field photos can be accomplished in virtually any environment, but when you don't have much control over your camera or lens try moving your subject.

Sometimes you can't move your subject or their background, and sometimes even moving them around won't give you a dramatic enough effect. If this is the case, try moving closer to your subject. Close proximity to a subject will often give the appearance of shrinking the depth of field.

The most common technique to achieving this look is to shoot with a small F-Stop on your camera. The smaller the f/ the larger your aperture. Dialing your f/ down to F3.5 or lower should make a big different. Make sure you focus sharply on your subject after adjusting it. Manual focus may help keep the focus on your subject and separate from their background. A word of advice when setting your f/ to a low value - you may get a low shutter speed (as indicated on the image chart here) and a resulting darker picture. Add more light into the frame (or raise the ISO) to help compensate.

Narrow your focal length! Zooming in or using a telephoto lense will shorten your focal length, giving the illusion of a more shallow depth of field. Note that moving up from a standard zoom lense to a telephoto (or zooming in) will visually increase the size of your background as well.

If all else fails, cheat! You can use a program like Photoshop to separate the subject from the background and artificially blur or sharpen the image. See my other tutorial for a simple way to do this.

Additional Tips

• Use a combination of the above steps to achieve the desired result.
• If this just ins't working, you can always fake it.
• Experiment! Mix things up, be creative.