So let's talk about finding your background. I want to just check a little bit on this to help you because when we're talking about finding your background, we've got some light here. And I just want to show you four different variations. There's more than this, but I want to show you the basics. So this is a clean background. So what we're looking at here, a clean background, this is a textured backdrop, this is literally just a wall, a concrete wall.

The light, as you can see is lovely. It's soft, it's shining directly into the subjects face. So I'm at the side now of the subject, I can see this lovely light, and then the wall is there to create a contrast to create the negative space, the area for the for the subject to fit into, and we get this really, really compelling image. Now that wall was really busy It was a load of trees or cars or people which wouldn't work so well. Especially if you're doing iPhone or smartphone photography. Busy backgrounds are your enemy.

Now. We've a DSLR you can kill it because you can, you know, create that bokeh effect, which we'll look at later. But simple plain backgrounds are always your friend. So when you're taking portraits if you can find good light, and then a good background that takes advantage of that light, and this is textured is concrete, so it creates its own interest. And then you've also got this drift from dark to light to the subject, which draws the eyes to that highlight on the subjects base. So that's a textured backdrop.

So let's have a look. A bokeh background backdrop, this is a really simple image of a friend, fellow photographer. And what I've done here, I've just use a DSLR probably used an 85 millimeter on this and of course, the subject and the background wasn't that great? And I've just killed it by blurring it using the natural depth of field in the camera. So how would you do this two ways you would just take a 50 millimeter lens prime lens or an 85 millimeter Set it low and take your image or you would take a 200 millimeter zoom racket out to 200 and then take the image and the reason I like 200 millimeter like compress the background what they tend to do is they get all the subject in focus. I'm not a big fan of one eye out focus on one eye and you don't need to do that.

And there's a lot of controversy about how you pronounce the word bouquets. bouquet bouquet bulk it lopsided, I always call it okay. You create bouquets. A soft background is out of focus background that matches the way your eyes naturally work when you focus on a subject. That's why it's so pleasing. By the way, you can create really compelling images and it's all about the subject.

That's what I'll call it, okay. backdrop or background. Now, a lot of times when you're photographing, you've got some lovely light. Again, we're in the edge of a tunnel here, you've seen me do that a lot, but the background is dark. I'm shooting into the shadow because although there's some information in the background, I don't want To be too noisy, I don't want it to be too busy, there's a better way of saying it. So you can use a dark background just to bring the focus onto the subject.

So the light is falling on the subject of a corporate image here, this is a conversation. And then the background is just dark. And it just falls away because of that, and there's enough light and interest in it to still make it compelling to give it context, but it is very, very simple because it's dark. So dark backdrop can be used create compelling images. And then we've got the reverse of that. This is just a family portrait.

And we've just got a light backdrop. It's just to see in the background and give context, but it's like there's not much going on watching what's in the backdrop. I don't want anything in my background. I want you know, the subjects to be seen to be focused to be the interest in the image. So a light backdrop can be really, really good because again, it's just going to take appear and obviously I've used a DSLR here but you could even do this with an iPhone if the backgrounds simple enough, you'll get away with it. And you'll create this really simple image and you'll see this a lot.

I like simple backdrops I like all the focus on the subject. And that's what we've done here. And I just wanted to show you this because this might be your project, it might be something you do, and you want to incorporate in your project, a family photograph you want to take this is a great way to take it, find the light, then make sure you position them with a nice simple, clean, bright background and you get this image like this. Now notice there's no remoteness so not losing rim so we can use like backdrop