Photo How To

“Bokeh” is a very popular concept these days that's used to describe how lenses render out of focus areas in either the background or foreground of a photograph. The notion is a subjective one, and some lenses are said to have beautiful or “creamy” bokeh while others are criticized for the harsh way they render areas outside the zone of focus.

Pleasing bokeh is often considered most important in landscape and portrait photographs, but in the video below Swedish photographer Micael Widell provides seven tips for achieving “massive bokeh” regardless of the type of photos you shoot. Based in Stockholm, Widell is not only an excellent street, landscape, and commercial photographer, but he’s worked as an author, engineer and web designer.

Widell’s bokeh tips cover both shooting and editing techniques, and include everything from focal length, camera-to-subject distance, aperture choice, and sensor size, to blurring the background of an image in Photoshop and using Lightroom to stitch together multiple photographs for cool bokeh effects.

You can find more shooting and editing tips on Widell’s YouTube channel, and be sure to look at our earlier story describing how properly blurred backgrounds can make or break an image.