Critique the Community
Shallow Depth of Field / Bokeh
Submit Your Best Bokeh Images
Congratulations to the winners!
Last month's bokeh themed Critique the Community was a huge success! The entries were really beautiful, and the winning images are absolutely stunning!
For this specific contest, first place wins lenses from Lensbaby and second and third take home a free tutorial of their choice. Congratulations to everyone who made the episode and to all the other amazing images that simply weren't chosen. If you want to participate in the next critique, stay tuned to Fstoppers.com/Contest and good luck to everyone who enters!
Rules & Prizes
Welcome to a new Critique The Community! October is here which for many conjures up memories of football, autumn leaves, and of course Halloween. But for this month we want to focus on shallow depth of field and that obsession photographers have with Bokeh.
Bokeh is simply that cool aesthetic you get when parts of your image go out of focus. This can be achieved with wide open apertures like f/2.8 or f/1.4 or it can be forced by shooting with longer telephoto lenses and focusing on a closer subject. No matter how it is achieved, everyone loves a nice creamy bokeh effect on their images.
For the entire month, we want to see your best images taken with super shallow depth of field and interesting use of bokeh. It can be subtle or it can be over the top; we just want high quality images that use a shallow depth of field in some interesting way.
This contest is open to any genre of photography including landscapes, portraiture, weddings, still life, portraiture, conceptual photography, and any style that showcases super out of focus bokeh effects. Each community member can submit up to 3 images for this contest.
Rules
- All images must be submitted from now until October 30t at 11:45 PM Eastern Time.
- Every image submitted must include a short story on how you took the photo, what were the challenges, how you used natural or artificial lighting, what gear you used, and any other interesting insight on the image itself. Since this critique is focused on bokeh, you probably need to explain the lens you used as well. Photos that do not include some backstory on how it was taken will not be picked to be featured in the Critique the Community episode.
- Each image must show some form of bokeh or out of focus effect in the image.
PRIZES
This month's contest is sponsored by Lensbaby. Lensbaby first made their splash in the photography community decades ago with their affordable Lensbaby Original which allowed photographers to replicate a tilt shift type of effect by adjusting the focus plane of the lens. Nearly 20 years later, the company has expanded to now offering nearly a dozen lenses aimed at producing unique and specific effects.
For this contest, Lensbaby is giving away two of their most popular prime lenses, the Velvet 28 ($549.95) and the Composer Pro II w/ Edge 35 ($449.95). The Velvet 28 lens offers a creamy, dreamy effect when shot wide open and can also focus extremely close for near macro quality shots. The Composer Pro II + Edge 35 allows photographers to achieve that tilt shift lens look that Lensbaby has been famous for all these years. With nearly twice the tilt angle of traditional tilt shift lenses, the Composer Pro II will allow you to create wildly shallow depth of field images you simply cannot create with normal lenses.
Both of these lense are available in a variety of camera mounts and the winner will be able to pick their preferred mounting system.
Total Prize value: $1000.
All Fstoppers readers can get 10% off any of the Lensbaby collection by using the code "LBFstoppers" directly on the Lensbaby store.
Second and Third Place - This month both 2nd and 3rd place winners will receive a full photography tutorial from the Fstoppers Store Total Prize value: $300
Good luck to everyone who enters and we look forward to seeing your best Bokeh filled images!
Featured image by the talented Lilia Alvarado
Thu, 10/30/2025 - 23:45
This contest has ended.
242 people have cast a total of 16,300 votes on 497 entries from 252 participants
Contest Submissions
Click on the thumbnails below to comment and rate each image.
Click here to learn about the Fstoppers rating system and what each star value means.
26 Comments
REMEMBER: If your photo doesn't have Epic Lighting it is automatically rated ⭐- The Snapshot or ⭐⭐- Needs Work.
😂
Dean, Maya the Beagle has the exact true lighting from the natural light coming through the window.
What is "Epic Lighting" . There is more to a photo than just lighting in my view. If someone wants to give a one or two stars to a photo than what is the purpose of participating in such a contest.. I look at more than lighting, but I am emotionally attached to the photo and recognize the moment.
Cheers, Joachim
I would propose that the purpose of entering a contest such as this is to gauge how well your photo resonates with other people. Naturally, every photographer is emotionally attached to their own picture, so that doesn't distinguish your work in any way. It's a great reason to make a picture but has no bearing on the scores. In other words, nobody cares how you feel about your own picture.
The contest will give you some idea as to whether a large number of viewers respond the same way that you do to your photo. If you think it's a three or four rated image, and your scores are between one and two, obviously you failed to communicate your emotion and impact of the photo to the viewers. Whether that matters is for you to decide, but if you want honest feedback, this contest is a good place. The scores, in my opinion, mostly reflect the degree to which someone likes your picture, and that's about all. I'd love to hear more comments in support of a vote, especially the "needs work" score, but it's not gonna happen. I suspect a 2 vote simply means someone likes it more than a 1 and less than a 3, despite the scoring guidelines as stated in the contest.
Capturing epic light, or what I call dramatic lighting, is arguably a major ingredient that elevates an image above the level of an ordinary snapshot. People for the most part respond positively to dramatic light. Whether it's natural or artificial light is only important to you, otherwise that distinction is irrelevant to most other people viewing your image. As you say, there are other compelling aspects of a photo besides lighting, but that seems to be high on the list as a basis for people's scores.
a long response with some truth and some fiction. I had many conversations about this topic in the past. Photo editing has progressed so much in the last 10 years that things like epic light is often created where little existed. Also, someone giving a 1 to an image may as well abstain from scoring it. No photo can be that bad