Bokeh

Sometimes phrases or meaning come into general use almost by popular consent or by accident and photography is no different.  One word that has been used more and more in the past 10 years is 'Bokeh'.  So what is Bokeh?


The term comes from the Japanese word boke, which means "blur" or "haze" and in photography, bokeh is the blur,or the aesthetic quality of the blur,in out-of-focus areas of an image, or "the way the lens renders out-of-focus points of light."** 


Differences in lens aberrations and aperture shape cause some lens designs to blur the image in a way that is pleasing to the eye, while others produce blurring that is unpleasant or distracting—"good" and "bad" bokeh, respectively. Bokeh occurs for parts of the scene that lie outside the depth of field. Photographers sometimes deliberately use a shallow focus technique to create images with prominent out-of-focus regions.**


So is that clear now?  This technique focuses the viewers attention on the subject and I use a wide (f2.8 - f5.6) aperture on the long lenses (80-200mm / 50-500mm) or on the 60mm Macro lens   Here are a few of my images that demonstrate bokeh. 

** source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokeh



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