Gadgetory

one of the most useful tricks you can do with your DSLR is to create a bouquet effect okay comes from the Japanese word for blur and you've seen this effect all the time in portrait photography the foreground subject is in sharp focus and the background is a beautiful hazy dreamy blur if you've been wondering how to get a shot like this I'm going to show you how the trick to getting the shot is to crank your camera down to its lowest aperture setting for example the zoom ones that came with my camera states right here that the lowest aperture setting is a 3.5 a lens with a 1.8 or a 2.3 would be even more dramatic but let's make this work I'm going to put my camera into manual mode or program mode or aperture priority mode where I can set the aperture manually on this camera I can set the aperture using this dial bringing it all the way down to a 3.5 once the lens is letting in this much light the image tends to blow out if your camera isn't compensating for that automatically bring the ISO down until the exposure looks normal finally let's focus in on our subject and when you do you're going to notice that the background gets nice and blurry and then you can take the shot to see if we can take this further let's try another location and another lens this is a 50 millimeter prime lens which means no zoom a fixed focal range and in this case a 1.8 for the lowest aperture setting which is ideal again well dial in the lowest number which means the widest aperture in this case 1.8 and then adjust the ISO maybe even the shutter speed to get the exposure right focus and shoot now--if bouquet is so pretty why not use it in every situation well you're basically obliterating the background of anything you're shooting if you're shooting your kids birthday party or vacation photos you want to have the background you want to have the context that's the whole reason for taking the shot second when you have the aperture open this wide it's very difficult to hold focus there's very little margin for error so maybe the subjects nose is in focus but things start to get fuzzy around the ears and if you're shooting something that's moving forget about it bouquet is great for shooting portraits it's great for shooting artsy photos of inanimate objects anything that's standing still and now you know how to do it so go out and give it a try i'm donald bell and for more tips on using your camera head over cnet.com slash