Hi, I'm Cami Turpin. Let’s talk photography rules. I’d say the number one would probably be sharp focus, right? No matter how beautiful your composition or how perfect your exposure, if your subject is not in focus, it’s a fail. Well, unless it’s not. I’m here to tell you that you can take successful out-of-focus photos, both intentionally and unintentionally, so get your finger off the delete button for a minute. I’m not just talking about that delicious background bokeh blur, or some beautiful soft foreground layers, I’m talking about your SUBJECT being perfectly, beautifully, wonderfully blurred, and why that is often exactly the kind of magic your photo needs.
I often shoot with intentional blur, both from movement and from focus, but the shot that really hooked me was unintentional. During one session with my daughters, I was taking several shots of them running across a hill. On one shot, the focus landed well behind them on the clouds. This created the most beautiful and strange watercolor-type effect that looked to me like they were illustrations in a children’s book. It was a different kind of blur than focusing on something in the foreground, and I realized there are a lot of different types of blur, and that they could all create a different mood or tell a different story. Now intentional blur is my favorite type of technique to use when I’m really trying to create symbolic or creative imagery.
Let’s talk about some of my go-to techniques.
Foreground Focus:
This creates a beautiful and easy to control blur, but usually draws your viewer’s eye right to the sharp focus in front. This often works well if have a subject you’d like to focus on, for example, footsteps in the sand or snow leading to an out of focus subject in the distance. However, I often use foreground focus with nothing special in front in order to make my subject feel just out of reach or more ambiguous. You can create this blur with any focal length, but I will vary my aperture depending on how much I want to be able to see the figure in the distance. Depending on how close I am and how wide I’m shooting, this will make a huge difference. You don’t always need to be at your widest aperture, as you might unintentionally blur your subject into oblivion.
Background Focus:
When you focus on something in the distance or past your subjects, they will look even more like the watercolor people I was talking about earlier. The color becomes more saturated, and the blur is a little more grainy or painterly. However, this will often create a halo effect around your subjects which you may want to smooth out in Photoshop. I will often use strong backlight which causes this halo to disappear. The blur may also cause thinner objects like limbs to narrow or disappear completely, as it works opposite from foreground focus which makes objects in the background appear wider rather than thinner. I have found this technique to be most effective at a distance with a longer lens like an 85mm or 135mm and at around f2.
Manual Focus:
I have a lot of manual focus lenses. While they can be a pain to actually nail focus with, they are also really great for intentionally creating blur. I don’t have to switch from AF to MF on my lens to trick my camera into letting me shoot a blurry image, and I can just control the amount of blur I want just by twisting my focus ring. This is also a really great way just to study how focus effects your image just by racking focus as you look through your viewfinder. There have been many times this was the best way I found to achieve the look I wanted.
Freelensing:
Ah, the magical and frustratingly fickle tilt-shift effect freelensing gives. This is one of my favorite types of blur. Not only does it also saturate colors, but it also provides the only way I’ve found to hack digital photography into creating a light leak—something usually reserved for film photography. It also allows you to create hyper-focus on your subject if you really nail that slice. And even if you don’t nail focus, or you intentionally miss, it creates an uneven spectrum of focus and blur that cannot be created any other way and creates a melancholy or magical mood. I have found I am most patient with imperfection while freelensing, and I have created some of my strongest images both by nailing and missing focus. Part of the magic, for me, is the uncertainty. I do find I am much better at controlling focus when my subject is far in the distance, and I am shooting with a longer lens. Up close, I like using shorter lenses, like 50mm or 35mm, and smaller movements often cause me to miss focus more easily. One of my favorite tricks is to get my slice of focus ready, then ask my subject to move through the frame and push the shutter once they hit that spot.
Slow shutter:
There is nothing more powerful in storytelling than a good slow shutter when you need to create a feeling of movement or confusion. Panning, or keeping your camera moving at the same speed as your moving subject while you shoot with a shutter of 1/30 or slower, is always fun with a bike ride, a merry-go-round, or other fast and fun kid activities. Allowing the camera to remain stationary while an object moves through the frame is a powerful effect as well. You can determine just how transparent your subjects are by how long you keep your shutter open. I have used anywhere from 1/30 to 3 seconds to create different moods or stories. A relatively new technique for me is shutter drag, which combines a slow shutter with a flash to combine both sharp focus and motion blur. (The flash provides focus, and then the shutter remains open to capture any movement or additional ambient light.) Slow shutter movement is one of my favorite ways to use blur to tell the story of fleeting childhood or confusion.
Using objects to create blur:
You can also create intentional blur in your photos by using objects in front of or around your lens, or anywhere in your shot. Some of my favorites are prisms, mirrors, pipe cleaners, and fabric. Anything that adds color is always a hit for me. But I will also use any objects around me to add some dimension—furniture, windows, pool toys, blossoms, scrunchies, double exposures, etc. Anything that creates depth and texture can work to add some extra oomph.
No matter what, when you are intentionally adding blur, you will deal with some imperfection. Shooting film helped me with this mindset, as I often wait weeks to see how my images turn out, and I had to learn to not just be patient with but LOVE those less-than perfect shots as I usually only took one or two frames of any given composition. I have found that embracing that imperfection has not only allowed me to simultaneously expand and refine my style, but also gave me courage to trust myself and to try even more experimental techniques. Intentional blur using any of these techniques can give you more power and range in storytelling. I find that the more I practice these methods, the more easily I can pull them out when I need them, and I also find myself needing them more often.
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