Bokeh

Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Personal

No, it’s not read “bou-keh” like bouquet, it’s read “boke”, like book. Bokeh, from Japanese “boke” meaning “blur”, is a photographic term referring to out-of-focus areas in an image produced by a camera lens.

Well, that’s basically all I know about bokeh. It creates a blurred effect in photos, and shifts narrows focus to a particular point-of-focus. It’s especially important when shooting in macro mode (close-ups of subjects) as it blurs the background and brings focus to the subject. Bokeh can be achieved by using a large aperture. The easiest way to get bokeh (at least with my camera, which has a max aperture of f/2.8) is when shooting with macro mode. Point at a close subject, but an angle where the background is filled with a distant subject.

Here’s a lovely photo from Wikipedia. Note that the lense used has a significant number of blades forming the aperture so that each point of light becomes a circular disc, rather than polygon shaped, jagged edges of the aperture.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Josefina_with_Bokeh.jpg

One great example I found on how the bokeh can make a photo so much more interesting is this:


http://photo.net/mjohnston/column49/

You can’t just help but look at the blurred parts, wondering what the lady is looking at.

Hm, seems like I’m getting more and more interested with macro shots and blurry backgrounds. Anyway, check out some shots I took of Eu Hua’s lovely bookmark at my photos page.

Permalink | July 1st, 2007

3 Responses to “Bokeh”

  1. Jeffrey04 Says:
    July 1st, 2007 at 11:44 am

    depth of field?

  2. Jonathan Ng Says:
    July 1st, 2007 at 2:24 pm

    Depth of field simply means how much of the subject is in focus. The bokeh effect means in out of focus parts of a picture isn’t just blurred, each point of light becomes a disc. In the first picture above with the little girl, the background would be just blurry, the bokeh effect gives it the little dots.

  3. 拼凑Jeff » Blog Archive » 乞帮叫化鸡（图片帖） Says:
    July 2nd, 2007 at 2:00 am

    [...] 飞了，应该让光圈开大点把背景模糊掉（bokeh）让主题（跳伞人）更突出 [...]

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