There's one question photographers ask me all the time...

"How do you get such a blurry background?"

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The short answer is yes, an expensive lens will definitely help, but it's far from being the reason your backgrounds look blurry. Give me and another photographer the exact same camera and lens, and there's a very good chance we'll end up with two completely different results.

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So what actually creates that smooth, creamy background everyone is after?

There are four different factors working together every single time, and ignoring just one of them can completely change the result, even if you nailed the other three.

Let's go through them one by one... 

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Focal length

Let's start with the easiest one, the longer your focal length, the blurrier your background becomes. An 85mm will blur the background more than a 50mm, a 135mm more than an 85mm, a 200mm more than a 135mm... and the list goes on.

Keep that in mind, because you'll soon realize it's even more important than your aperture.

 

Aperture

This is where expensive lenses enter the conversation, because a lens with a very wide maximum aperture usually comes with a much bigger price tag.

But here's the mistake many photographers make...

Take a 14mm f/1.4 lens. That's an enormous aperture, yet you'll still struggle to get much background blur, simply because wide-angle lenses naturally keep much more of the scene in focus.

Now switch to an 85mm f/1.4, and suddenly your background starts melting into that smooth, creamy look everyone loves.

If you've been shooting with wide-angle lenses and wondering why your backgrounds never look soft enough, this is probably one of the biggest reasons.

Now here's the interesting part... the first two factors are all about the gear you own, the next two are completely free, and understanding them will improve your photography long before buying another expensive lens.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Minimum focusing distance

Have you ever tried focusing on something really close, only to hear your lens desperately hunting back and forth without ever locking focus? That's because you've moved closer than your lens's minimum focusing distance, and here's the interesting part... that's also the point where your lens produces the strongest background blur.

Let's use dogs as an example.

A Chihuahua is easy, you can move really close while still fitting the whole dog into the frame, and your background becomes beautifully blurry.

Now replace that Chihuahua with a Great Dane. Suddenly you have to step much farther back just to fit the dog into the frame, and your background doesn't look nearly as soft anymore.

So what do you do? Ask the dog to lie down.

Now you can move closer again, and if it puts its head on the ground as well... congratulations, you just cheated physics a little.

If you want the dog standing while keeping that creamy background, it's time to go back to the first two points and bring a much longer lens.

This is exactly why a 300mm f/2.8 can produce far more background blur than a 35mm f/1.4, read that sentence again... focal length comes before aperture.

The distance between your subject and the background

Let's exaggerate for a second.

Imagine I hand you a magical 1000mm f/1.4 lens, then ask your subject to stand with their back touching a wall.

Guess what? The wall still won't be very blurry.

Why? Because there's almost no distance separating your subject from the background. The farther your subject is from whatever sits behind them, the easier it becomes to separate the two.

This is also why I spend so much time shooting from extremely low angles. People often say "get down to the dog's eye level", but that's only half the story.

I usually go even lower, sometimes placing the camera almost on the ground and tilting it slightly upward. Suddenly the background isn't the grass anymore, it's the treetops, the sky, or the tops of buildings hundreds of meters away, and because they're so much farther away, they become much blurrier.
 

So if you only remember one thing from this post, let it be this...

Long focal length + the widest aperture possible + getting as close as your lens allows + keeping your subject as far away from the background as possible = beautiful background blur.