Bokeh. Sometime when I wasn’t looking this apparently became a big buzzword in the camera community. I mean, sure, I’d heard it and knew what it meant, but hey, I’m just a young photographer, I hadn’t quite realized this term seems to have popped out of nowhere. Until my manager, who’s been working with cameras probably longer than I’ve known they existed, asked me what a client of his meant when he said this shot had “film-like bokeh” and it hit me that maybe it isn’t quite as common a term as I thought.

But, with the rise of full-frame digital cameras, and the continuance of APS-C and 4/3 and digital compacts using all sorts of screwy chip sizes, this is probably an important term to understand (kinda like crop factor, but boy that’s a different argument.)

So, what exactly is bokeh, anyway? “Bokeh” is a term derived from Japanese which I’m told roughly means “to make blurry.” If any of you are fluent in Japanese and can give me a more authorative etymology, feel free to leave a comment and I’ll be glad to edit this post.

Bokeh is a subjective quality found in many, many photographs and is generally well-loved in the artistic community. It is, as near as I can tell, contributed to and shaped by the following factors:

1. Focal Length
2. Sensor Size
3. Aperture
4. Distance Between Subject and Background
5. Diaphragm Shape
6. Voodoo Hocus-Pocus

I’ll spend a few posts talking about all those, because boy it’s a lot to chew through. But, before I end this post, I’ll give you an example. Let’s say you grab your EOS Rebel (DSLRs are better, it’s hard to illustrate this with, say, a Nikon Coolpix camera). You walk outside and decide to shoot, I don’t know, a frikkin cool bug. So, you want to throw the background out of focus because, man, it is all about this bug in your photo, so you open your lens up as far as it goes and SNAP! take the picture. That nice (or maybe not-so-nice), out of focus  background displays the bokeh of your shot.

Or, it could be like the background of this shot:

Photo by Derek Martin

That’s enough for now. Check back soon for the effect of lens choice on this mystical “bokeh” stuff.