Les Jones

Word of the Day > Word of the Day: Bokeh

From Ken Rockwell:

Bokeh describes the rendition of out-of-focus points of light. Bokeh is different from sharpness. Sharpness is what happens at the point of best focus. Bokeh is what happens away from the point of best focus. Bokeh describes the appearance or "feel" of out-of-focus backgrounds and foregrounds.

Unfortunately the good bokeh doesn't happen automatically in lens design. Perfect lenses render out-of-focus points of light as circles with sharp edges. Ideal bokeh would render each of these points as blurs, not hard-edged circles. Mathematicians would say the intensity distribution of the blur circles are rectangular in perfect lenses, and good bokeh would prefer a Gaussian distribution. This is one area in which physics doesn't mirror what we want artistically.

And from Wikipedia:

Bokeh (from the Japanese boke ぼけ, "blur") is a photographic term referring to the appearance of out-of-focus areas in an image produced by a camera lens.[1] Different lens bokeh produces different aesthetic qualities in out-of-focus backgrounds, which are often used to reduce distractions and emphasize the primary subject. The effect itself is the circle of confusion, an image of the aperture convolved by the image itself.

Mike Johnston, former editor of Photo Techniques magazine, claims to have coined the bokeh spelling to suggest the correct pronunciation to English speakers,[2] replacing the previous spelling boke that derived directly from the Japanese word for "fuzzy" and had been in use at least since 1996.[3] The term bokeh has appeared in photography books at least since 2000.[4]

Previous WOTD - The Rachel

LATER: Bokeh is apparently pronounced Bo and in Bob and Ke as in Ken.

Bonus! - Focuso is a site specializing in intentionally out-of-focus photography. Interesting stuff. I think he takes the pictures that way, but it seems like you could take an in-focus picture and make it out of focus with Photoshop.