Thursday, December 21, 2017

Good Bokeh? What?

Art likes to send me, our daughter in Illinois and our son in Maryland photos of coins he finds during his morning walks.


When he sent the following photo, our son texted back, "Good bokeh!"

I texted, "What's a bokeh?"

He and Tif reminded me that I'd already asked that before when Art had sent another photo like this.


Here's that other photo that Art sent everybody which was also supposed to have good bokeh.

I'm afraid I just couldn't remember what bokeh was so I had to look it up.
"The term comes from the Japanese word boke  which means "blur" or "haze", or boke-aji, the "blur quality". The term bokashi is related, meaning intentional blurring or gradation..."     
..."Good bokeh is also important for medium telephoto lenses (typically 85–150 mm on 35 mm format). When used in portrait photography (for their "natural" perspective), the photographer usually wants a shallow depth of field, so that the subject stands out sharply against a blurred background." -- Wikipedia
 OK... I'll try to remember now. And maybe I can try using this technique someday...
If I remember.

16 comments:

  1. I actually finally remembered what the word means and was pleased to see it used here so properly! :-)

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  3. Interesting to learn this new term.

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  4. I always thought of it as depth of field, focusing on the foreground object. It's a bit difficult with a phone camera, at least for me.

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  5. interesting phrase...a technique not that easy to do in photography...

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  6. Oh, I'm smiling. Both those photos certainly have good bokeh indeed.

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  7. New to me term but I was amazed at how profitable his morning walks are.

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  8. I agree with the good bokeh! MY camera is digital and has no special features! I don't have the same good fortune on my walks...need to look down more I suppose!

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  9. If it aint bokeh don't fixah it.
    How much bokeh you can get is directly related to how large your aperture is in your lens... but most people these days use auto settings in their digital and phone cameras, so this feature is slipping away more and more. If any of you want to try to induce more bokeh, select a manual setting on your camera and try to open the aperture up as much as you can. You'll have to decrease the ISO if possible, and when you compose your picture, shoot your item as close to the lens as you can, while grabbing a bit of background farther away. Your human eye also does this; when sitting in a dim room your iris opens up, so the stuff farther away blurs... but the instant you look away at the stuff farther away, your eye refocuses. With bokeh in a camera, you are 'looking away' but keeping the same focus point and not refocusing, so the background appears blurry. What this does is to naturally draw your eye to the stuff that's in focus in the picture. There are lenses that can have so much bokeh you can't even tell what's in the background, its just a beautiful, creamy pastel wash of color.

    walt

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    1. I just told Dennis he needs to look at your comment. He'll love it! I'm sure my photographer friend will also be checking you out. :-)

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  10. Ah, bokeh is background blurring. Yeh, that happens with close up shots and is cool.

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  11. Now you have to decide on pronunciation BowKuh or BowKay. :)

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  12. I love it! We're rewatching videos as we cannot remember it.

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