How to Take Christmas Pictures with Blurry Bokeh Circles

Hi! I am a family photographer in Cleveland Ohio, and Christmas time is my favorite season to take pictures. It might be cold and dreary outside, and we’re limited on the amount of daylight we are getting, but Christmas decorations, lights and smiles definitely make up for it!

In this blog post I wanted to share a simple tutorial on how to add nice, big, blurry bokeh to your pictures with the Christmas lights in the background. These do not have to be Christmas-specific though. You can use string light any time of year to add some magic to your photography.

This will work with any DSLR/mirrorless camera, as well as the iPhone, and I will give the examples for both.

The amount of bokeh (that blurry creamy background) is defined by the Depth of Field. As you probably already know, Depth of Field is s the distance between the nearest and the furthest objects that are in focus. You want your sources of light (Christmas lights) to be as far away from this area in-focus, as possible. Depth of Field depends on such things as your camera sensor size, your lens focal length, aperture (f-stop), and the ratio of the distances between your subject and the background, and the subject and camera.

Since we more likely than not can’t change our camera’s and potentially lens’ characteristics, we’d have to do the following.

The main trick is to adjust the difference in the distances between the camera and the subject AND subject and lights. Check out these schematic drawings, as well as examples, to clear out any confusion.

Taking Bokeh Pictures with an iPhone/ Cellphone camera

And here you can see the proof. These pictures were taken on my iPhone, so we do not have any control over the aperture size. I simply took a picture of the car far away from the Christmas tree (1st photograph), and right next to it (2nd photograph). Cellphone cameras have tiny sensors and consequently tiny apertures, but even still, we were able to obtain the blurred out bokeh circles.

In the following photographs my son’s position did not change in relation to the Christmas tree, but I moved closer and further away from him, and here are the results. Similarly, the closer I am to him (so the ratio of distances increases), the bigger are the bokeh circles.

Taking Bokeh Pictures with a Camera

We have a little bit more control when using an actual camera. When using the camera with manual settings, we want to bring the f stop as low as possible. Wider aperture -> larger bokeh circles. It also helps to use a longer focal length lens. Here is an example taken on 35mm f/1.8 lens. The subject-to-camera distance is the same (my arm only extends this long haha), but I was moving closer and further away from the tree.

As you can see, the further I am from the background, the larger and better defined bokeh circles we get.

Here are the same lights in the background, but taken on a 50mm f/1.4 lens (yes, both the focal length and min f-number are more favorable)

I hope this tutorial was helpful, and you can accomplish all of your Christmas photos goals! Did you know you can make the bokeh circles turn into any shape and form you want? Check out this tutorial!