Getting that soft look in your photography can be easier than you think. Let's look at how you can soften the look of your photographs.
First of all, you'll want to shoot wide open - That means to have your camera set at the highest aperture you can ... which is actually the lowest number in the AV on Canon or A on Nikon. I use Canon and shoot pretty much all my still life photography with my 50mm f/1.4. If you don't own a lens that goes that high, use your lens with the highest aperture and zoom.
The photo above was shot with my 50mm at f1.4. If you don't own a prime lens, you can still get this effect using a zoom lens at the highest aperture you're able to go.
For example:
- using any lens
- set it to the highest aperture (lowest number - maybe f3.5)
- step back far enough so that you zoom all the way out
- focus on the portion of your set up that you want to be in focus
- take your picture
You should get a nice blur in your image.
A key thing here is to have your items in the image at different planes. If they're all on the same plane everything will be in focus. Take a look at my image above ... the flowers in the little heart shaped dish are in focus as are a portion of the stem of the flowers next to it and the lace, but everything else is blurred.
And then look at the cherry blossoms above. My focus is obvious. This time I chose to focus on some of the blossoms a little further back and still have other blossoms in the frame, but blurred out.
Maybe you have a single vase of flowers that you want to photograph. Just focus on one of the flowers or the section in front and you'll get a nice blur on the rest of the flowers.
Does this help?
Do you have any questions?
If you do, or if there's something entirely different you have a question about, let me know and I'd love to do a post on it (if I can 🙂 )
Please share your thoughts below ... 
