How do I blur background like in this video?

I see nothing. No file attached.

Aperture wide open (smaller number) can give a narrow DOF and can blur the background. You will need to shoot in the setting aperture priority or manual to do this.


The wider the lens the greater the DOF (depth of field) at a given aperture, the less you will see the blur effect.

Indeed, we need to see the video you are referring to.
The biggest challenge in shooting video is focus, so if you rely on depth of field to get a blurred background then you could make a big mistake.
My way of achieving blurred background but keeping the subject in focus is compression and not shallow DOF. You can achieve this by the use of telephoto lens, examples are 300mm F4 or 400mm f5.6

Starfox said:

Hey guys, I am new to photography and I have lots to learn and I will enjoy the challenge and journey but right now I just need to know one thing. How exactly do I create this effect

Here you see a very clear picture of this guys face and the background is completely blurred out. I have a Canon EOS 70D

Thanks for any advice guys

Click to expand...

You need a wide aperture lens, and likely need ND filters. Its a bit of a advanced topic. FF bodies are easier to get blurred backgrounds.

When you have a wide aperture lens set at say f/1.8, the background can be blurry, but ... there may be too much light to get a good exposure. This is where a neutral Density (ND) filter comes in. It reduces the light coming to the lens so that you can still have your lens set to f/1.8 and capture your video.

That's a pretty brief explanation, there are things like faster shutter speeds (Not much help for a D70) just the basic idea. A good ND filter will not affect the colors in your video, poor ones can affect color and even cause weird artifacts. Don't buy one of the cheap ones from Amazon, research for decent ones.

A wider aperture lens is the easiest option.

If you like doing things the hard way, a few other options come to mind:

1. Your software should have some blur options. Tweaking these settings and playing with thresholds might work. If you're after some free software to do this, have a look at Davinci Resolve.

2. If you want to get more creative, you could film the background with out the actors. Then film the actors. In post, you merge the two, mask the actors on their layer and blur the background only layer. I find masking really painful, but in theory and with enough patience, this should work.

3. Film your actors in front of a green screen. Then film the background. Blur the background as much as you want to and substitute it for the green screen. Most software should do this reasonably well.

Mt Spokane Photography said:

Starfox said:

Hey guys, I am new to photography and I have lots to learn and I will enjoy the challenge and journey but right now I just need to know one thing. How exactly do I create this effect

Here you see a very clear picture of this guys face and the background is completely blurred out. I have a Canon EOS 70D

Thanks for any advice guys

Click to expand...

You need a wide aperture lens, and likely need ND filters. Its a bit of a advanced topic. FF bodies are easier to get blurred backgrounds.

When you have a wide aperture lens set at say f/1.8, the background can be blurry, but ... there may be too much light to get a good exposure. This is where a neutral Density (ND) filter comes in. It reduces the light coming to the lens so that you can still have your lens set to f/1.8 and capture your video.

That's a pretty brief explanation, there are things like faster shutter speeds (Not much help for a D70) just the basic idea. A good ND filter will not affect the colors in your video, poor ones can affect color and even cause weird artifacts. Don't buy one of the cheap ones from Amazon, research for decent ones.

Click to expand...

When I started playing around with photography about two decades ago, I would have appreciated if the above, although very accurate information, had been fleshed out with something like this:

For subject isolation you want a thin plane of sharpness which you can achieve with a large aperture. Aperture numbers are expressed in parts of focal length, so as f is your focal length that currently is 35mm, f/2 is a rather large aperture hole of 17.5mm diameter and f/16 is a small one of 2.2mm diameter. As a rule of thumb for blurring background detail: any detail as large the aperture will be recognisable one subject distance behind where you've focused. Three subject distances behind, you'll recognise detail three times the aperture and so on.

For fluid motion video, you want to use a slow shutter speed. Half the frame rate is a common recommendation you'll get and it has history way back in old mechanical cinema gear. 24fps video = 1/50s shutter speed. Faster shutter speeds will get sharper-looking video but you might get wheels all of a sudden switching direction of rotation and people seemingly walking around lit by stroboscopes. Slower speeds add more motion blur and you can't go slower than your framerate anyway.

After this, your camera sensor should capture whatever light is let through the aperture during the shutter being open. The sensor is very, very sensitive to light. How sensitive it should be is set on a scale called ISO. This normally starts at 100 and goes up to sensitivities where noise and starlight take over your image.

The sensitivity at ISO 100 is so high that on a sunny day, you could have 1/50s if you close your aperture to roughly f/24, or you could have f/2 if you had a shutter speed of 1/8000s. Not what you want for video. There is one more way of letting less light hit your sensor though and that is a grey filter, also known as Neutral Density filter. Density is a weird scale where adding 0.3 lets in half the amount of light and neutral as in "not blocking more of any particular colour".

An ND1.8 filter (6 photographic stops, sometimes marketed as ND 64) will get you down to the half-the-framerate "180° shutter" at f/2 in full-on sun on ISO100. If you put your eye to the finder, you would be forgiven if thinking you'd left the lens cap on. If you can live with limiting yourself to smaller apertures, for example by using longer lenses, you can get away with less dense (dark) filters. Indoors, you most often do not need a filter.

To really make your subject pop, add some extra light to their face. A LED panel in the hot shoe can go a long way, as can an assistant holding a reflector. Put an orange filter on your light if your background is primarily incandescent/warm-white lit.

To get clear audio, use deadcats if outdoors, always keep microphones close to mouth and make sure you fix your audio level as high as you dare but that your audio never, ever, clip.