Playing around with the basics of photography, my first hook was all about blurry backgrounds aka boke. I read that in theory a large aperture will decrease the depth of field and cause only the subject to be clearly in focus but I’ve also read that fixed lens digital cameras tend to be very generous when it comes to depth of field, to the point of being the envy of SLR users, and tend to be pretty poor at boke. I wanted to see for myself what could be done with my Canon S3 IS. All these shots are as they came out of the camera and taken with the Av mode in order to have control over the aperture.

Despite using a large aperture in this first shot, you can see that the bridge and the buildings in the background are still relatively clear and are not really calling out the subject as much as we might like. I’d read that it makes a difference if you use a large aperture in combination with zooming into the subject so…..

I took a few steps back and zoomed all the way in keeping the subject full in the frame. To demonstrate the difference I closed the aperture all the way down to see exactly how the aperture would affect the shot. Notice there’s a completely different background relative to where I’m standing, the picture is taking on a completely different perspective and the background is quite blury. Next step was to adjust the aperture and see what happened….

Now it’s looking much better; seems the art of boke lies in stepping away from the subject, zoom in tightly, open up the aperture as far as the light meter will allow and fire away. The camera would only let me get as far as f/3.5 at 72mm.

Using the same method but picking a non-distinct background causes blurring beyond recognition putting the entire focus of the shot on your subject. This shot was against a cluster of trees and seems to demonstrate the effect quite well. Check out some great examples of boke using the Canon IS S3 in this Flickr forum.