I’ve been sitting on a folder of “bad location” shots for about six months now. You know the ones. You drove an hour, the light was flat, the scene was uninspiring, and you shot anyway because you were already there. Then you get home, dump the files, and immediately move on because the conditions weren’t what you planned for.

That folder has been bothering me. Not because the shots are irredeemable, but because I’ve been treating “bad conditions” as a reason to not think harder about the shot itself.

Then I watched this Thomas Heaton tutorial and had one of those minor creative crises where you realize you’ve been solving the wrong problem.

The Problem Isn’t the Location, It’s the Framing Strategy

Heaton’s premise in this video is deceptively simple: if you’re in an uninspiring location, shooting wide open (meaning a very large aperture, like f/1.8 or f/2.8) forces you to isolate a subject and blur out the context that isn’t working for you. The environment stops being the composition. The subject becomes the composition.

This sounds obvious until you realize how many landscape photographers default to f/8 or f/11 out of habit because “that’s what you do for sharpness.” Heaton is deliberately going the other direction. He’s using shallow depth of field as a creative decision, not a technical compromise.

The key move here is intentional subject selection under constraints. Wide open apertures demand that you find something specific to focus on. There’s no hiding behind a sweeping panorama. You have to commit to a thing, whether that’s a single piece of foliage, a rock, a detail in the foreground, and let the rest fall away into a soft wash.

What “Wide Open” Actually Means in Practice

For anyone coming from a design background rather than a photography one (hello, it me), let’s be concrete. Aperture controls how much of the scene is in focus. A small f-number like f/1.8 means a very narrow plane of sharpness. A high f-number like f/16 keeps almost everything sharp from foreground to background.

Heaton shoots at or near the widest setting his lens allows, which creates that creamy background blur called bokeh. In a location with ugly or distracting elements, that blur functionally erases them. The processing step that follows in Photoshop or Lightroom is then about enhancing the separation between the sharp subject and the soft background, not fighting against a cluttered, everything-in-focus scene.

In post, he’s working with the raw file to bring out texture and detail in the focused area while keeping the out-of-focus regions smooth. He’s also paying close attention to color grading in a way that respects the tonal separation the aperture already created. You don’t need to mask aggressively or fight the image because the lens already did most of the heavy lifting.

The Edit Follows the Capture Decision

This is the part that translated most directly into my Photoshop workflow. When you shoot wide open with a clear subject in mind, your edit becomes much more targeted. You’re not trying to globally correct a flat, uninspiring frame. You’re enhancing a focal point that already exists in the raw file.

In practice, that means your adjustment layers and masking work should follow the focus fall-off. Sharpen and add contrast to the in-focus region. Leave the bokeh areas alone or add only the subtlest warmth or cooling to guide the eye. Fight the urge to pump clarity globally because it will destroy the softness you worked to create in the field.

Heaton also emphasizes that this approach makes you slow down and look for the interesting detail rather than hoping the wide shot will do the work. That discipline is transferable regardless of what you’re shooting.

Where I’d Push Back (Slightly)

Here’s my honest counter-experience. This technique is excellent for environmental constraints, but it can become a crutch if you’re not careful. I’ve seen photographers, and I’ve done this myself, start defaulting to wide-open shooting as an avoidance strategy rather than a creative one. If you’re blurring the background because you didn’t want to put in the compositional work to make the background interesting, that’s a different problem.

There’s also a Photoshop-specific consideration: if you’re planning to composite an image or blend multiple exposures, shooting wide open complicates your masking significantly. Edge separation between a sharp subject and a smooth bokeh background looks great as a straight shot, but it can be genuinely annoying to work with in a composite where you need to isolate elements or swap skies. The blur makes clean selections harder in some cases, especially with fine detail like hair or foliage at the edges of your focus plane.

So yes to this technique for single-image captures in difficult locations. Be more cautious if your post-production workflow involves heavy compositing.

The Actual Lesson Hiding Inside This Tutorial

The best insight from Heaton’s video isn’t really about aperture. It’s about constraint as a creative tool. When you can’t rely on dramatic light, sweeping scenery, or ideal conditions, you have to find the image within the image. Wide-open shooting imposes a constraint that forces that search.

That’s a mindset I’m taking back to my own work, whether I’m in the field or in front of a screen. The constraint isn’t the problem. The constraint is the prompt.

Watch the full video for the visual demonstration of how Heaton selects and processes his shots in the field. Seeing his framing decisions in real time makes the technique click in a way that reading about it honestly can’t fully replicate.