Tamron Blog: Creating Beautiful Bokeh With Zoom Lenses

When selecting a lens, one of the important factors most will consider is how creative it'll allow you to be and one way you can do this is by capturing images with a shallow depth of field. To do this, you use the lens to isolate your subject and throw the background out of focus (bokeh). 

Typically, a requirement for creating shallow depths of field are fast apertures and this is something zoom lenses often play second fiddle to primes with as generally, they can't match the same speeds (unless the zoom lens is really expensive). However, as a zoom user, this shouldn't hold you back as with a little planning, and making the best out of situations, you can achieve pleasant blurry backgrounds that really make your subject 'pop' from the frame.

Using the Tamron 16-300mm and an old Zenit camera as the subject, Rick used the inexpensive but still impressive Tamron 16-300mm f/3.5-6.3 Di II VC PZD Macro lens to demonstrate just what levels of bokeh you can achieve with a zoom lens.

On all occasions, the aperture was set to the widest available and the focusing point was the Zenit wording.

Tamron 16-300mm f/3.5-6.3 Di II VC PZD MACRO Aperture range