BOKEH PORTRAIT HOW TO

The way I set up the flash for the self-portrait above is to simply use one simple $70 manual speedlight flash shooting through a cheap $10 white shoot through umbrella. (That's me–Jim Harmer–on the far right).įlash photography always looks stunning at night, when the flash is not competing with any ambient light.

No need for 5 flashes for something like this.

But a simple night bokeh portrait really only requires one flash and a simple umbrella. Shutter speed: 1/100 (Needs to be under 1/200 for the flash sync speed)Īperture: f/2.8 Most of the portraits we took this night on the workshop involved 5 or more flashes. There are three more ways to create shallow depth of field: (1) Use a long focal length, (2) place the subject physically close to the lens, and (3) leave a long distance between the model and the lights in the background. Simply using a low f-stop will help, but you’ll need to do more to make the lights larger in the frame. The light bursts are simply city and street lights in the distance, which are put so far out of focus that they become these beautiful light bursts.

BOKEH PORTRAIT HOW TO

How to Make Bokeh Bursts of Light at NightĬreating the beautiful circles of light in the background of a night portrait isn’t complicated, but it will require a bit of understanding of depth-of-field. I always share step-by-step tutorials like this in my free “Behind the Photos” newsletter but I decided to put this one on the site as well. This last week I was in Southwest Florida holding a completely free photography workshop for readers of the site. If you feel like your portrait photography has become stale, then a night portrait is an excellent way to spice things up.

Bokeh portrait