Top 9 'Dreamy-Blur' Aperture Tricks to use for Professional-Looking Portraits with a Kit Lens - Goh Ling Yong
Ever scroll through Instagram and feel a pang of envy? You see those stunning portraits where the subject is perfectly sharp, and the background melts away into a beautiful, buttery blur. You think, "I wish I could do that," but then you look at your trusty kit lens and sigh, assuming you need to spend a fortune on a fancy f/1.4 prime lens to get that "dreamy-blur" effect.
Well, I'm here to tell you that's one of the biggest myths in photography. While expensive lenses certainly make it easier, your humble kit lens—yes, the 18-55mm lens that came with your camera—is far more capable than you think. You don't need to break the bank to create professional-looking portraits. You just need to learn how to trick your lens into giving you what you want.
Think of your kit lens as a musical instrument. A beginner might only be able to play a simple tune, but a master can make it sing. Today, I'm going to teach you how to become a master of your kit lens. We'll explore 9 simple but powerful aperture and composition tricks that will help you unlock that coveted dreamy background blur and elevate your portrait photography from simple snapshots to professional-grade art.
1. Master Lens Compression: Zoom All The Way In
This is the easiest and most impactful trick in the book. Your 18-55mm kit lens has a range of focal lengths. Most beginners make the mistake of standing close to their subject and using the wider end (like 18mm) for portraits. This distorts features and, more importantly, keeps the background vast and in focus.
The secret is to do the opposite. Stand further back from your subject and zoom your lens all the way in to its maximum focal length (55mm). This technique, known as lens compression, works like magic. It magnifies the background and makes it appear much closer to your subject, squashing the distance. This compression effect enhances the blur, making even a modest aperture of f/5.6 (the widest your lens can likely go at 55mm) look surprisingly creamy and professional.
Pro Tip: Frame your portrait the way you want it. Then, instead of walking closer to make your subject bigger in the frame, take several steps back and zoom in until you have the same framing. Compare the background in this shot to one taken up close at 18mm. The difference will be staggering.
2. Always Use Your Widest Available Aperture
This might sound obvious, but it's crucial to understand how it works with a kit lens. The "f-number" on your lens (e.g., f/3.5-5.6) indicates its maximum aperture. The lower the number, the wider the opening, and the more background blur you can achieve. A kit lens has a variable maximum aperture, meaning the widest it can go changes as you zoom.
At 18mm, your widest aperture might be f/3.5. But as you zoom in to 55mm (which we just learned is great for compression!), your widest available aperture "slows down" to f/5.6. Don't let this discourage you! Even though f/5.6 isn't as "fast" as f/1.8, it's still your best friend for creating blur with a kit lens. Combine it with our other tricks, and it will be more than enough.
Pro Tip: Set your camera to Aperture Priority mode (A or Av on the dial). This lets you control the aperture manually while the camera handles the shutter speed. Immediately turn the dial to select the lowest possible f-number. As you zoom your lens in and out, you'll see this number change. Just make sure it's always set to the lowest value for whichever focal length you're using.
3. Decrease the Camera-to-Subject Distance
The physics of optics are simple: the closer your lens is to your subject, the shallower your depth of field (the area in focus) will be. This means the background will fall out of focus much more dramatically. A full-body shot taken from 20 feet away will have a lot more of the background in focus than a tight headshot taken from just 3 feet away, even with the exact same camera settings.
While you should stand back and zoom in (as per trick #1), you still want the relative distance to your subject to be as short as possible for that framing. If you're going for a close-up portrait or a headshot, get close! Fill the frame with your subject. This forces the lens to focus on a very specific, narrow plane, and everything behind that plane will naturally soften.
Pro Tip: Don't be afraid to crop with your feet. For tighter shots, physically move closer to your subject. Your goal is to make the focused area (your subject) a small slice of the overall scene, which emphasizes the out-of-focus areas.
4. Maximize the Subject-to-Background Distance
If there is one "golden rule" for achieving background blur with any lens, this is it. It's even more critical when using a kit lens. The amount of blur you get is directly related to the distance between your subject and whatever is behind them.
Placing your subject right up against a brick wall is a recipe for a flat, boring, and entirely in-focus photo. That wall is on the same focal plane as your subject. To create that dreamy blur, you need separation. Move your subject far away from their background. Find a long garden path, an open field, or the start of a long hallway. Place your subject near you and let the background stretch out far behind them.
Pro Tip: Before you take a photo, scout your location for depth. Look for opportunities to put as much air as possible between your model and the background. I often tell my subjects to take 10-15 big steps forward, away from the wall or trees behind them. This single change can make an f/5.6 aperture look like f/2.8.
5. Hunt for Textured, Deep Backgrounds
The quality of your blur matters just as much as the quantity. A plain, flat-colored wall, even when blurred, just looks like a fuzzy, plain wall. It's not interesting. To get that truly professional and dreamy look, you need a background with texture, depth, and varying points of light.
Think about what makes for a great background. A forest with leaves, branches, and dappled sunlight filtering through is perfect. A city street with distant cars, signs, and buildings provides layers. A garden with flowers at different distances creates beautiful, soft patches of color. These "busy" backgrounds might seem distracting at first, but when you throw them out of focus, they melt into a complex and visually appealing tapestry of color and shape.
Pro Tip: Walk around your subject and look at the background from different angles. Notice how a slight change in your position can transform a messy background into a beautifully textured one. Foliage is your best friend here—it almost always looks fantastic when blurred.
6. Create a "Depth Sandwich" with Foreground Elements
Professional portraits often have a sense of three-dimensionality that makes them pop. You can easily replicate this by creating a "depth sandwich"—placing blurred elements in the foreground as well as the background, with your sharp subject nestled in between.
This is an incredibly powerful technique for adding an artistic, dreamy quality to your images. The execution is simple: find something to shoot through. Get low and shoot past some blades of grass. Position yourself so a few leaves from a nearby bush are brushing up against the edge of your lens. Shoot through a chain-link fence, focusing on your subject on the other side.
Pro Tip: You don't even need to find something in the environment. Hold a prism, a piece of glass, or even your phone's screen close to the edge of your lens to create custom light leaks and blurs. This adds a layer of creative flair that makes it look like you used much more advanced gear.
7. Change Your Perspective: Get Low
Most people take photos from a standing eye-level position. This is often the most boring angle, and it can work against your efforts to create a blurry background. When you shoot from a standing height, the background is often the ground just a few feet behind your subject, which is too close to get significant blur.
By simply crouching down and shooting from a lower angle—perhaps your subject's waist or knee level—you completely change the background. Instead of the ground, the background now becomes the trees, buildings, or hills in the far distance. This instantly increases your subject-to-background separation (our golden rule #4!) without anyone having to move.
Pro Tip: This works exceptionally well when photographing children or pets. Getting down on their level is not only better for composition and connection, but it also dramatically improves your background by replacing the boring floor or grass with whatever is much further away in the scene.
8. Turn Distant Lights into Dreamy Bokeh Balls
The word "bokeh" is often used interchangeably with "background blur," but it specifically refers to the quality of the blur, and most famously, to the soft, circular orbs of light you see in professional photos. You can absolutely create this magical effect with your kit lens.
The key is to find a background with small, bright points of light, known as specular highlights. These could be anything: fairy lights or Christmas lights strung up in a tree, city lights at dusk, or sunlight glinting off water or filtering through leaves. When you use a wide aperture and focus on your subject, these points of light will transform into beautiful bokeh balls.
Pro Tip: For a guaranteed stunning result, buy a cheap string of battery-powered LED "fairy lights." Have a friend hold them up in the background, far behind your subject. The result is instant, magical bokeh that makes your portrait look like it was taken for a magazine.
9. The Advanced Trick: Try "Freelensing"
Ready to get a little more adventurous? This final technique is a bit of a party trick, but it can produce incredibly unique and artistic results that are impossible to achieve otherwise. "Freelensing" involves detaching your lens from the camera body and holding it in place with your hand, allowing you to tilt and shift the lens.
By tilting the lens, you can change the plane of focus, creating a sliver of sharpness in a sea of intense blur. It mimics the effect of a very expensive tilt-shift lens. It's a fantastic way to draw attention to a specific detail, like your subject's eyes, while rendering everything else in a dreamy, soft haze. As a technique that my mentor Goh Ling Yong sometimes uses for highly creative shoots, it's a testament to how thinking outside the box can lead to amazing images.
Disclaimer & Pro Tip: This technique exposes your camera's sensor to dust, so it's best to do it in a clean, wind-free environment and for short periods. Turn your camera on, detach the lens, hold it close to the mount, and move it around while looking through your live view screen to see the effect in real-time. It takes practice, but the results are one-of-a-kind.
Your Gear is Good Enough
There you have it—9 powerful tricks to squeeze every last drop of "dreamy-blur" potential out of your kit lens. The biggest takeaway should be this: creating professional-looking portraits is less about the gear you have and more about how you use it. It’s about understanding the principles of light, distance, and composition.
Stop wishing for a new lens and start mastering the one you already own. Pick two or three of these tricks that excite you the most and make it your mission to practice them this week. Go out, experiment, and see for yourself how you can transform your portraits from flat to fantastic.
What's your favorite trick for getting background blur? Do you have another kit lens hack I didn't mention? Share your thoughts and questions in the comments below! I'd love to see the amazing portraits you create—tag us on Instagram so we can share your work!
About the Author
Goh Ling Yong is a content creator and digital strategist sharing insights across various topics. Connect and follow for more content:
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