No Bokeh? No Problem! These Out of Focus Backgrounds Hold You Over Until You Get that Fast Lens
Want a blurry background for your portraits on-demand, whether or not you’re using a fast lens? Or maybe you are using a fast portrait lens, but you want to shoot with it stopped down to the sharpest possible aperture without sacrificing that beautiful bokeh you’re going for.
Well now you can now do that without having to put serious distance between your background and subject. Just pop up one of Lastolite‘s new Out of Focus Backgrounds.
Yep, this is another one of those photography inventions that falls in the ‘wish we’d thought of that’ category. And while it might come across as ‘cheating’ on some level, the benefits of an already-blurry background are obvious.
If the effect you’re going for in-studio requires that you’re stopped down a bit, or your sharpest lens isn’t necessarily your fastest lens, you don’t have to pick and choose in order to get nice bokeh in your background. Just slap up one of the blurry backgrounds.
Lastolite offers you two collapsible-frame 4×5′ reversible choices that will give you four total options: one background features green summer foliage on one side and city lights on the other, while the other features fall foliage and seascape:
Obviously these backgrounds from Lastolite aren’t going to put fast primes out of commission any time soon, but they’re an intriguing option that would be a welcome addition to the studio photography toolkit.
Not that they come cheap. Picking one up will set you back $185… $370 if you want all four background options. To find out more, head over to the Lastolite website. And if you’re ready to drop some cash on a set of your own, you can find both the city light/summer foliage and fall foliage/seascape options on B&H Photo.
Image credits: Photographs courtesy of Lastolite
