To tell better visual stories with photography, director Steven Spielberg has some great advice for you.
Before you instinctively crank up the aperture for dreamy bokeh, consider what you might lose in terms of the story-telling power of your image. Take your finger off the aperture ring for a moment and listen to one of the world’s greatest visual storytellers.
Still photography and filmmaking are all about storytelling, and to be a great photographer or film director, you need to be a great storyteller. Steven Spielberg’s incredible storytelling talent has been the foundation of his success as a director and has made him an icon in the film industry. Many of his films are considered milestones in popular culture, and as someone who grew up watching them, films like “Jaws,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Schindler’s List,” and “Saving Private Ryan” (just to name a few) are like milestones in my life.
Steven Spielberg is one of the most hands-on directors when it comes to determining the look and feel of his films—so much so that, unlike many other directors, he will often determine the framing of each shot himself rather than leaving it up to the cinematographer. From his very first film, Spielberg has had access to a wide variety of the best lenses and equipment, but he has always leaned toward using wide-angle lenses set at narrower apertures to effectively bring the entire frame into focus. The ease and finesse of Spielberg’s filmmaking makes it easy to overlook technical details like these when you’re so caught up in the story unfolding before you, but if you pay attention to this the next time you find yourself watching one of his films, you can see how he tries to make every part of the frame contribute to the story.
One before videotape The video I’ve presented here highlights the problem of falling into the trap of using wide apertures and blurred backgrounds indiscriminately in your photography—to the point where it can become a creative crutch that can even limit your photos’ ability to effectively convey the story you want to tell. While that video explores the work of stills photographers who have made the conscious choice to use narrower apertures for this purpose, the lesson for visual creators remains the same. Whether you’re shooting stills or video, unwisely using wide apertures to achieve blurred backgrounds can hinder your art more than it helps it.
In this in-depth and well-researched study videotape created by the YouTube film studio “wolfcrow,” you’ll see how Spielberg’s choice of wide-angle lenses and narrower apertures allowed him to create a more immersive experience for the viewer, drawing them into the frame and deepening the story. As filmmakers or photographers, making the conscious decision to blur the background in our frames can be a good choice when the background is irrelevant to the story we’re trying to tell, or because we have a specific need to isolate a subject and focus attention on it. But sometimes, making this choice on “autopilot” can also rob our visual content of depth and expressive potential.
