Bokeh

Hello! I'm going to discuss a bit about something called "bokeh".

Bokeh is originally a Japanese term "暈け" / "ボケ" ("boke"), sometimes referred to as "ボケ味" ("boke-aji") and it simply means blur or haze.

Bokeh is quite simply put the phenomena where the background (or foreground) of the picture (or both) get blurred, leaving only the narrow focused area clean, hence creating an interest point into the picture while the otherwise distracting stuff subtly fades away.

Enjoy the smooth bokeh!

There are basically three ways to create bokeh into a photo:

1. shooting full aperture with a lens with a wide aperture (small f-number), usually lower than F5, preferably lower than F2.8
2. using a long telephoto lens (100-300mm or longer), shooting relatively close objects (2-4 meters away)
3. Shooting very close to the subject (less than 15 cm away) / macro photography

Here are three examples of how aperture affects bokeh:

Example 1

A tree stub shot with a mobile phone with fixed aperture. F2.6 / 3mm (Wide angle, ~28mm full-frame DSLR equivalent)

In the previous picture, you may see the trees and branches in the background are slightly blurred. But they are still clearly visible and can relatively well be recognized as trees. They may even be distracting to some.

I couldn't find the technical specifications regarding the camera on my Jolla C smartphone, but I would guess the sensor size is somewhere around 3.7mm × 2.8mm (according to info gathered from other similar mobile phones), thus the crop factor may be about 9.5x. Using the crop factor, we can calculate the DSLR equivalency of the lens and focal length so we can compare it to my camera. Simply multiply F2.6 with 9.5 and we get F24.7, and do the same for the focal length, 3mm × 9.5 = 28,5mm.

Now we must remember these figures are the full-frame equivalents, and that my own camera is a crop-sensor camera with a 1.6x crop factor. So if we divide the earlier figures by 1.6, we'll get roughly 18mm and F15.4.

I didn't have my 18-55mm kit lens with me today, which would have worked somewhat better for teaching about the crop factor. I will instead use my 50mm lens for comparison. After all, this lesson wasn't supposed to be about crop factor anyway, but bokeh!

Example 2

Shot with Canon EOS 550D – Sigma 50mm F1.4 at pretty small aperture; F10

In this photo we'll see how the trees in the background are clearly visible, just like in the mobile phone photo. I used a relatively small aperture.

Example 3

Creamy smooth bokeh at F1.8, the background has vanished into a haze of green and white.

This photo clearly shows the difference between a mobile phone and a camera with detachable, exchangeable lenses.

But it isn't always so. A mobile phone can still do a relatively good job, if you shoot close enough:

Some bokeh, shot the branch at <10cm distance.

I hope you liked today's photos. I was supposed to post them after noon, as the photos were already done, but the writing took me a bit longer than I thought, and top of that we went to see an apartment viewing with Vera, and I also had to visit the 1st year students' parents' evening at Miro's school... And then read to my boys, before I could continue writing this post.

I'm now finally finished it, and it's 1am again. ;) Such fun is having flexible work hours.

So see you again tomorrow!

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[Previous post: Hercule Purrot]

Previously in 365, One photo every day:

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 

Brothers (266/365)
Miro and the long-wave transmitter. (267/365)
Creamed creativity (268/365)
Shakers (269/365)
Just an idea (271/365)
Multi-vitamin drink (272/365)
Palm Sunday – Easter witches (273/365)

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