You should have seen many photos online that involve BOKEH effect. What is “bokeh effect”? The circle-ish lights you see in the background of a photo (generally a portrait) is called a bokeh. How to achieve bokeh? Here’s how to do it !!

STEPS :

Grab your camera !! Just kidding (of course you need your camera). Set to low aperture(f-stop number is high). Some people recommend setting it to the lowest aperture. But that actually differs according to the distance from the light source.(the lights which needs to be bokeh-ed). You actually need to experiment with the aperture. For example, when i was at a distance of nearly 8 ft away from my subject, I had to set the aperture between 4-6 to get satisfying bokeh effect. The first picture is when I set the aperture between 11-16, I get sharp but small bokeh effect.

See that the bokeh effect is achieved but the bokeh is small. Now when you increase the aperture (decrease f-stop number) to say, f/4.5, you get this.

Now see the bokeh in the picture above. So you need to open the aperture a bit depending on the distance from your subject to get a nice bokeh (the shape is heptagon since the aperture is not fully opened). Notice that I changed the shutter speed to 1/15 from 1/8. That is because opening the aperture increases the amount of light that gets in. So we need to control the amount of light by increasing the shutter speed.

As I said before the aperture size determines the shape of bokeh. The aperture was fully open hence the shape of the bokeh is more circled than in the above photos.

USING FLASH :

You actually need a flash here to get a bit of light so that you can see the subject (now the subject is the car since the bokeh is the background). Generally the in-camera flash is not that good. It is recommended that you use an external flash. If you don’t have one don’t worry !! Just decrease the flash compensation to -3.0 or the least available.

Just try as I mentioned and you should have a decent bokeh in no time !!