Bokeh

Talking about how nicely blurred your background is

Of all the photographic quality factors, Bokeh is probably the only one that does not have a physical measure. You sort of say it is nice.

What is this

First of all this happens only when you focus relatively close (at least sufficiently closer than infinity), have a large aperture so that the depth of field is relatively small.

Your main goal is to get the object you focus sharp and sometimes you want that this stands out from the background. By manipulating the aperture you can influence the depth of field so that only your object is in focus and everything else sort of blurs and melts away.

Technically you want the lens to focus on your subject, but you also sort of care about how the out of focus regions look like. The quality of the out of focus performance is what Bokeh is about. Problem is, it is not something measurable, it is more a subjective feel of how the blur looks like.

Some lenses (like the Nikon 135 I have) add actually additional control to influence how the out of focus areas will show up (so far I was not really able to make much use of that to be honest), but in most lenses, it is how it is.

My experience is that the background and how close you are to the field that is sharp has more to do with how the Bokeh looks like than the lens itself. Obviously a lens with a large aperture has better chances of getting shots where you could highlight something using depth of field, so in that sense the technical quality of the lens matters.

Here is one example

This is a Nikon 180 at f/2.8. Some would probably say this has a nice bokeh as the background melts away and Bianca the pops up. However, the background in this picture is actually quite far away. Let us take a look at another one. I am not sure what the others will say, but the background has actually quite a strong pattern that sort of distracts. I would say this not not nice bokeh. But is that the fault of the lens? hardly? This is shot at f/5 which allowed more of the background to be more prominent. So not exactly the fault of the lens.

These pages are for Amateur Photographers and not really for seasoned photographers and professionals. I have no affiliation or commercial interest with any brand/make. I write from my own experience. I ended up using mainly Nikon, so I am more familiar with this brand than others. See price for notes on pricing as well as photography related links.