Bokeh bokeh light how to#
Bokeh bokeh light manual#

If there aren't enough city lights in the background, you could place a few flashlights in the distance shining toward the camera. Step 2: Place your subject far away from the lights from the street. This works best when it’s completely dark. There weren’t quite enough of them for my taste. I copied and pasted some of the bokeh bursts so that there would be more light spots.Bring up the shadows slider in Lightroom so that my hair stood out from the background and wasn’t so dark.The post-processing of this photo was quite simple.

Bokeh bokeh light how to#

I always share the original, unretouched photo in my free Tuesday “Behind the Photos” newsletter, and the readers of the site always tell me they appreciate seeing the photo straight out of the camera so they can know how to do the post-processing as well. The picture at the top of the post is after about 30 seconds of Lightroom/ Photoshop work which is detailed below. This provided enough extra bursts of light to add interest. We then walked about 15 yards behind the model and placed a colored gel over our cell phone flashes to color the light. To enhance the background, 5 or 6 of us grabbed our cell phones and turned on the flashlight apps. So we didn’t get as many lights as we wanted. When we took the picture above, we were in a darker area of the city in the parking lot of our hotel. If you’re shooting in a downtown area with lots of tail lights and lights from signs and stores, you’ll get plenty of light bursts to make a nice background. Because it was so dark outside and our camera settings were gathering so much light, the flash was on very low power (1/16 if my memory serves me correctly).

The flash was placed to camera left and slightly higher than my eyeline.

Bokeh bokeh light manual#

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. My Camera SettingsĬamera: Nikon D800 Lens: Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8 lens Focal length: 70mm Shutter speed: 1/100 (Needs to be under 1/200 for the flash sync speed) ISO: 1,000 Aperture: 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. 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.