Tog-Talk

Ep. 31 Bokeh... cliche or creativity

• Kevin Ahronson • Season 1 • Episode 31

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Unlock the secrets of creating stunning bokeh and elevate your photography game with our latest episode of Tog Talk! I'm Kevin Ahronson from the Hampshire School of Photography, and today, I'm tackling your most burning questions about photography. Prompted by David Emery's curiosity, we dive into what bokeh truly is, why it has skyrocketed in popularity in the digital age, and how it can dramatically improve the focus and quality of your images. Tune in to discover the fine art of achieving that dreamy background blur, master the nuances of controlling depth of field, and understand how your choice of lens and shooting distances can make all the difference.

But wait, there's more! We'll also be reflecting on whether the craze for bokeh is eclipsing other vital photographic techniques. Are we losing the art of environmental portraits that capture the essence of a scene? Together, we'll explore the pressures photographers face to stick to trends and the importance of staying true to your unique style. Whether you're a beginner eager to make your photos stand out from smartphone snaps or a seasoned pro looking to refine your craft, this discussion promises to be both enlightening and inspiring. Don't forget to submit your questions for future episodes—your voice is what makes Tog Talk truly special!

Got a Photography Question?

If you have a burning question about (virtually) anything to do with photography, click on this link. You can record your question onto your device (phone, laptop, etc) and if picked, I will play it during the show. https://www.tog-talk.com/voicemail/

Photographer's Evening

Want to attend one of my free Photographer's Evenings? These are small groups of up to 8 people, sat around a table with me, exploring your photography journey. If you live near Fleet (in Hampshire), click here for more information:

https://www.hampshirephotoschool.com/a-photographers-evening/

Looking for courses

Want to find out about my live, in-person workshops, check out the Hampshire School of Photography website:

https://www.hampshirephotoschool.com

Hampshire Photography Network

A free Facebook group for amateur photographers who want to connect, collaborate and grow together.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1222685165227144

Contact me

You can contact me by leaving a message via this link: https://www.tog-talk.com/contact/





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Kevin:

Hi, my name is Kevin Aronson from Hampshire School of Photography and welcome to Tog Talk 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0,.

Speaker 2:

All engines running Liftoff. We have a liftoff.

Kevin:

Hi, my name is Kevin Aronson from Hampshire School of Photography.

Kevin:

I've been behind a camera now for over 50 years. I've been teaching since 2009 and I have literally taught hundreds and hundreds of people how to take photographs, from complete beginners through to advanced amateurs and even those who want to go professional. Tog Talk is recorded once a week. It comes from two words tog and talk. Tog is a slang word for photographer, so if you're a photographer, you're a tog. So we've got photographers in conversation.

Kevin:

It alternates between a solo session like this one tonight, with me answering questions sent in from listeners, and a session which is jointly hosted between myself and the very lovely Kerry Perry. Now Kerry was a private student of mine for a whole year back in 2017. She has turned professional and she's opened a studio in Fleet, the town where I live. Recently we we got together, we met up and, because we both share the same passion to help new photographers navigate their photography journey, we thought we'd team up and pool our resources. So tonight it's me on my own. Next week it's myself and Kelly, and it will alternate like that with a solo session or a co-hosted session.

Kevin:

So tonight, questions, questions, questions, questions. For this to succeed, I need your help. I want to be here to answer your questions and for you to get those questions to me. I wanted to make it as easy as possible. I wanted to make it as easy as possible. Now, in the show notes below you'll see there's a link to the TalkTalk website and if you click on that link it'll take you to a page where there's a big button to click on and that link will take you straight to the TalkTalk website, in particular the page where there's a big button in the middle. Now, if you click on that button, you can actually ask your question through your microphone. So whether it's on your phone or your laptop, it doesn't matter, but you can ask the question and you can say something like Hi, my name is James Bond or something similar.

Kevin:

This is my question for tonight. And you ask the question and then, if your question is picked, then we read it or we play it back. Actually, we play it back live on it. Well, it's not even live, is it? We play back the recording and then I answer your question. You'll see it happening tonight. So this is the first one tonight.

Kevin:

This is where all the mistakes are going to be made, as we kind of iron out the process. So you may be one of those people who doesn't like the sound of their own voice and you'd rather not have your voice played on air. No problem, all you have to do is, when you record the message, when you record your question, say can you not play this back? This is for reference only. I don't want to hear my voice and we won't if your, if your question is picked, we'll read your question on the air. Ok, we don't want, you know, we don't want things like speaking into microphones, putting people off, because I know it can put some people off. Anyway, tonight we've got someone who's coming back to Talk, talk. We did an entire episode with him last year. David Emery is a wonderful guy who makes me laugh and he's got a question.

Kevin:

But before we go into that, here's a few words about the Hampshire Photography Network. Are you a passionate amateur photographer in Hampshire or the surrounding areas? Do you ever feel like your hobby is a solitary pursuit? Well, we know. No matter what your hobby, it's much easier to stick with it when you have friends to share it with. That's why we created the Hampshire Photography Network, a free Facebook group for amateur photographers who want to connect, collaborate and grow together.

Kevin:

Ready to connect with other photographers in your area? Head over to Facebook and search for Hampshire Photography Network. Just remember to answer the three simple questions to gain access. Thanks for that, yep. Just remember that you won't be let in if you don't answer the questions right at the front. So they're very simple. Questions like tell us a bit about yourself, just confirm you're not a professional and that you agree not to promote your own services, your website, blog, and so on. Great, okay. Now it's over to David Emery, as he asks the first question of this new solo series my question or discussion point is this are we becoming too reliant on bokeh in pictures?

Kevin:

you know, I feel myself that people starting out it helps differentiate them from, say, using a phone to take a picture. But are we losing too much information in certain pictures? Your thoughts?

Kevin:

bokeh, b-o-k-e-h bokeh. Now there will be some people listening to this who don't know what bokeh is. Let me try and explain it. It's the soft outfocus parts in the background of an image, or it could be in the foreground as well. It's where the background looks super soft. Ever watch those Hollywood movies where they do a close-up of the hero and the background behind them is just, oh, it's buttery smooth, but the background's gone completely out of focus. And that effect is called bokeh and it's proved immensely popular. Because if you're photographing someone and you can, in effect, bokeh out the background, in other words, turn the background out of focus, you separate your subject matter from the background. If you've got a busy background and it's all gone, blurred, it's not distracting anymore. And Boca has become immensely popular over the last I don't know 15 years, certainly 10 years, 15 years and I have to admit that I only really noticed it being used since digital came along. I don't ever recall it being mentioned back in the days of film, but it's possible, it's possible. So here's an interesting thing.

Kevin:

I tend to keep track of things. People ask me lots of questions during the course of the years I've been teaching, and the most popular one is what camera should I buy first? And the second question is what lens should I get next? But my third most popular by a long margin is how do I get those lovely blurred backgrounds when I'm photographing the kids or whatever I'm doing? And they're talking about bokeh. And it has become so popular now that other words have crept in, so bokehlicious is now crept into the dictionary. You can you can buy phone cases and camera straps and all kinds of accessories and t-shirts with bokehlicious written across. And manufacturers of lenses now realize that the quality of the bokeh of their lenses may often be the key selling point as to why someone will pick their lens over somebody else's. So a lot of manufacturers have have redesigned their lenses and reissued them with improved bokeh, and whenever you read a review of a lens, there's always a review of the level of bokeh or not, depending on the lens. So it is incredibly popular, but it is all pervasive as well and, like most things that humans do, once they realize something's popular or something's attractive, they just milk it to death and in the end it gets overdone and just. I'm now just beginning to sense that some people are not many, there is a minority are saying we've had enough of it, but I'm not sure. I still think it's got a lot of life in it yet. I still think it's so amazingly popular that even these one or two voices of dissent aren't really going to influence the trend for a while.

Kevin:

How do you get bokeh? Well, bokeh is created by there's a number of factors. There's five factors that I distill it down to and I teach on this in my workshops, but there are five factors which can help you improve the bokeh. It's all basically about controlling your depth of field so that the subject you're photographing is right. All basically about controlling your depth of field so that the subject you're photographing is right in the middle of the depth of field and the background behind them is way out of it. So it's so far out of the depth of field that it's badly out of focus.

Kevin:

And the main ways that you control depth of field are primarily with your aperture. So the wider the aperture the better. And lenses which have apertures that open up as wide as f2 or 1.8, 1.6, 1.4, 1.2, or even there's an f1 lens and there are a couple of lenses which are less than f1, as a 0.98 or something like that. The wider the aperture is, the better the bokeh, because the wider the aperture, the narrower your depth of field. So if you have a lens and you open it right up to f2, only a small part of the picture is going to be in focus. If you were photographing someone standing in that depth of field, they they can only move forward a fraction forwards or backwards. If they go beyond that they go blurred. So the depth of field is controlled primarily by your aperture size.

Kevin:

If you want a big depth of field like as if you were photographing a piece of landscape and you wanted the mountains in the distance and maybe there's a lake in the foreground and a little pretty cottage in front of that, with smoke coming out, the chimney and roses growing in the windows and that's right in front of you your depth of field will have to be enormously wide and for that you pick a very tiny aperture, which is confusing, because those who know what I'm about to say will be expecting me to say because wide depth of fields is a small aperture but that's a big number. So f11, f16, those are bigger numbers for apertures, but they are. They are very tiny holes, the aperture size is very small and with those you get a lot in focus. It's difficult to understand, isn't it? Without me just talking about it, to see a visual representation, this is much better, which is why you must come to one of my workshops. But it is true, people have an issue getting their heads around this. There's a counterintuitive thing going on. So let's just say this again For a wide depth of field landscape, you need a very small aperture.

Kevin:

Tiny little diameter only lets a very small amount of light through. But that small aperture is a big number. Big number, small aperture. The other opposite applies Big opening letting in loads of light is a small number. So here we go. I'll just say this again. So small opening is a big number, big opening is a small number. And the big opening is what gives you the very narrow depth of field, the great bokeh.

Kevin:

If you are a portrait photographer, you're photographing kids or families and so on, or even models, you may want to blur the background out. You want to open up your lens up really really wide. Open as wide as it will go, and the best lenses open up as wide as f2, 1.8, 1.6, 1.4 and so on. So that's one way to get bokeh. It helps also if you've got a longer focal length lens, the longer the lens. Okay. The longer the lens, the longer the focal length, the narrower your depth of field. So if you've got a long lens with a narrow depth of field and you've got a wide aperture let's say f2 you get a double whammy because you get a very narrow depth of field from the long lens, you get a very narrow depth of field from the wide open aperture and the two combined give you a super, super narrow depth of field and your bokeh gets great. So those are two things you need a wide aperture, you need a long focal length, then the distance that the subject is in relationship to the background.

Kevin:

If you've got someone standing in front of a brick wall, even with a wide open aperture and a long lens, that brick wall is not going to go very soft. It might be slightly soft. Brick wall is not going to go very soft. It might be slightly soft, but it's not going to go very soft. However, if you put that same person in a field and the nearest background behind them which may be some trees is like 200 or 300 yards away, they will go super soft and the bokeh will look amazing. They will go super soft and the bokeh will look amazing. So the distance behind the subject makes a big difference to how good the bokeh is.

Kevin:

Number four is the distance from you to the subject. The closer you get to the subject, the narrower your depth of field, and the narrower your depth of field, the better the bokeh. It's always about getting that depth of field narrow. So if you were to stand back and try and get all of them in the shot, head to foot, you would struggle to get a very soft background. But if you went in close and just got heads and shoulders, the background would be super soft. So you've got four. You've got the aperture being wide open, you've got long focal length, you've got a big distance behind the thing, the person you're photographing, and if you can get close to them, even better.

Kevin:

The fifth thing you can't really do much about without spending a lot of money, and that's because bokeh is affected by the size of your sensor. Now, it's not as simple as that, but I'm trying to keep it simple rather than going to explain why this is the case. But in effect, if you've got a full frame camera, you will usually take images with better bokeh than someone with a cropped frame camera, especially a micro four-thirds camera. So small sensors rarely give a narrow depth of field, and that's what you need for good bokeh the bigger the sensor, the better the bokeh. There's a nice catchy phrase the bigger the sensor, the better the bokeh.

Kevin:

Okay, so now you know how to get good bokeh. So you know what it is, you understand it's popular, we're obsessed with it, and you know how to get it. Now the big question is is it bad that people want bokeh so much? And this is the beauty of David's question Because bokeh is so popular, it's easy to get swept along with that. What would you call it? That movement, the bokeh movement? It would be very easy to think oh, everyone shoots with great bokeh, therefore I have to. Just because other people are doing something in photography, you don't have to as well. Now, let's say you were photographing someone in their place of work and it's important for you or for that person to have a photograph which tells a story about where they work. In other words, these are what we call environmental portraits. So environmental portraits, so a good one would be.

Kevin:

Let's say, a blacksmith. You've got into a blacksmith's forge. He's bashing away on the anvil, on a piece of metal sparks flying everywhere. You don't want Boca there. You want to be able to see all the fire in the background, the tools hanging from the ceiling, the light streaming in through the window behind him, all his resources, all the blackness, just the things hanging up all around, the shells, the bits and pieces. You want to be able to see what else is in the forge, what's around it. All those little things, all those bits of metal, all those tools, those scraps, those previously made items. They tell a story, they build a picture, they tell you about the environment that that guy's working. You could take an environmental picture of a football team and, provided they're decent, you go into their changing room and you get a picture of them sitting on their changing room stools or putting their socks on that kind of stuff, and you get a feeling of all of them standing there. But there's no blurredness. You see all the details.

Kevin:

Now, environmental portraits are a great way to shoot without the need for bokeh, so you would shoot this with a small aperture which is a wide depth of field. You need loads of light to do this, of course, because a small aperture doesn't let much light in. But you know, you get around that with by changing our iso or shooting at a slower shutter speed or bring some flash in and um and shots like this need the viewer to see everything that's going on. You don't want to blur the background out. It could be that you've been asked to photograph a friend's wedding and the bride and groom. They've been through the ceremony, you've done the whole bit at the church or wherever they get married, and you go out to the location where the reception is and the bride and groom want to do those pictures, what they often do halfway through the day. Where they go out with a photographer. They go out into the countryside nearby and they get some of those lovely shots of the trees and the waterfalls and whatever. You want to get the trees and the waterfalls in. You want to get the trees and the waterfalls in. You don't want to blur the background out. So again, you're not looking for a bokeh shot, you're looking for a shot where you see everything.

Kevin:

So the question I think that's coming from um, from david is that have we kind of lost the plot? Are we so focused on bokeh that we quite forgotten that there are other ways to photograph portraits? And my answer to that is actually probably yes. Probably yes, because when I teach portrait work, most people want to know how to blur the background out. The problem is, if you don't blur the background out, so many photographers don't pay enough attention to the background and they'll take a picture with no bokeh. So you've got the full detail of the background, but it's an untidy image. It's cluttered and it's distracting, and it's so distracting it takes away from the person you're photographing. So you can see why bokeh is important because it gets rid of that. It gets rid of the clutter by just nuking it out. You know, as I'm nuking it out, it goes so blurred you can't see what the detail is in the background. What do I do? I confess I like bokeh, I'm a supporter of it, but I am completely aware that it's not appropriate everywhere.

Kevin:

So his question he says are we becoming too reliant on bokeh in pictures? You know, I feel myself that for people starting out, it helps differentiate them from using, say, a phone to take a picture. What it means by that is, with a phone, unless you use some of the computer trickery, you don't get a narrow depth of field because the sensors inside phones are absolutely mute. So the only way you get a blurred background in a phone is by computer trickery. It's called computational photography. So if you want to differentiate yourself from a phone photograph, you go for a picture which has got a really great bokeh and it does kind of look professional. It looks like a Hollywood picture, it looks kind of cool. But please, david is right, possibly we are becoming a little too reliant on Boca.

Kevin:

I'm not sure that I would use the word reliant. I would think I would describe it as feeling almost pressured to use it because everybody else is. There's a peer group pressure and whether it's photography that's your hobby, or knitting, or playing the guitar or learning to cook, we're all kind of pressured by what other people are doing. There's a great psychological pressure to buy the best gear and to shoot in a way which is popular. We all follow what everybody else is doing because we think that's the right way or we want to be accepted or considered to be part of the norm. But in reality, you know, a lot of photographers are searching for that style they often read about they must find their own style, but of course they're not going to find it if they follow the fancy fashions that everybody else is now. This is. This is a tough one, because we all like to think, or we all like to believe, that people see us as an experienced photographer and so we take pictures which are accepted by the majority of the crowd. But if we step outside of that, that's when we're starting to imprint our own creative thought processes, our own mindset. There's nothing wrong in shooting loads of bokeh images, but if you shoot less of them, maybe, and start thinking more about developing your own style and not following the crowd and not being a sheep and not being concerned about what other people think, maybe you will get that style of yours a lot quicker.

Kevin:

I don't know. I don't know. Anyway, it's a great question, david. Thank you so much for sending it in. Don't forget, guys, I need more questions, so just follow the link in the show notes below, click on the button and ask away, and it may be your question that I'm answering In two weeks time. Okay, so thank you for listening To this episode Of Tog Talk. Please subscribe To the podcast channel and that way you'll get informed Every time there's a new episode Published, and it's it's very helpful to us if you subscribe, because the more subscribers we get, the more likely we are to be discovered by other photographers. That's because the people in podcast land recognize that this group's suddenly being active and maybe other people would like to know about it, so they push us up the table, so to speak.

Kevin:

Before we go, I want to tell you quickly about the photographers evenings we've got coming up Now. Once a month I run a small group. It's like a roundtable discussion meeting for a small number maximum of eight amateur photographers and and these are photographers I've never met before, because I'm looking for some fresh ideas from them. Okay, so we meet once a month in fleet in a hotel round a big table and we enter into a discussion about your photography. We call these evenings the Photographer's Evenings, and during the meetings, anyone who comes along will be able to discuss their photography progress and the highs and lows of their personal photography journeys, and my role will be to offer guidance on a wide range of topics. It could be lighting or composition, macro photography, maybe it's photographing people, landscapes, post-processing and photoshop, lightroom and so on, and loads and loads more, and you even get the opportunity to submit some of your photos for critique.

Kevin:

We ask you to submit two pictures one that you're really proud with and one which just didn't work, and then we look at it and try to figure out why it didn't work. The session primarily is to help you get back on track and to get some advice completely free of charge. What do we get from it? We get what's on photographers' minds right now, and this is helpful to me because I can find out what is on the mind of photographers On a month-by-month basis. I get an update on what people are thinking about, and this helps me keep my existing workshops up to date and current and also, to be frank, it gives me ideas for new ones as well.

Kevin:

So it's a win-win situation. You get loads of information andwin situation. You get loads of information and help. We get loads of information to help for our workshops. So they're free, and the only way you can access them is via eventbrite. Now, the best way to do this is from the website, and again, I'll send you a link, or I might even send you a link to eventbrite. Click on that.

Kevin:

Sign up doesn't cost you a penny. But if you can't make it, for goodness sake tell us, because I've had cases where three or four people haven't shown up. They haven't let me know, and we've had to cancel the evening and that costs me money and also inconveniences the other guys who turn up and we have to cancel. So please, if you do cancel, give me plenty of notice. Okay, well, that's it for today. Thank you so much for listening to talk. Talk, it's been a pleasure having you on board as a listener. I hope to meet you all at some point, maybe on a workshop, maybe on a day trip somewhere with your camera. In the meantime, have a fantastic week. Until the next one, it's going to be myself and kelly on the next one, and I think it's going to be myself and Kelly on the next one, and I think it's going to be a doozy, see ya.

People on this episode

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Kelly Perrin

Co-host
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Kelly Perrin

Co-host