The David Tejada look and maximizing your bokeh

David Tejada is a well known photographer in the strobist community, lecturing about big results from small strobes. He also makes a living taking corporate portraits and photos for annual reports. I attempted to imitate one of his photos from here. His photo uses two lights, once bounced backwards toward the white cabinets in his kitchen, and one shot upward from a coffee table to light the room in the background.

from my observations, it appears his style often includes either a background very far away or down a hallway, which leads to maximum bokeh. He also gets pretty close to the subject so the relative distances between the camera and his subject to the distance from the camera to the background is maximized, and this gives him the most bokeh.


I tried to imitate his lighting here, using one strobe in an umbrella, and a second strobe to light the background.

I was unable to get he amount of bokeh he does though, because I was too far away from my subject to maximize the ratio of the distances from the camera to the subject vs. the camera to the background. I should have moved closer to the subject, and then that would have narrowed the depth of field and created a more out of focus situation for the background.