But this isn’t always going to be the case.Įarlier this year, smartphone manufacturer Huawei teamed up with Leica to produce the P9 – a phone with two cameras which can simulate the shallow depth of field of a DSLR through computational photography. This is because we need a large sensor to generate enough background blur in the first place camera phones and compact cameras use much smaller sensors that make shallow depth of field difficult to produce. You might notice that bokeh is really only discussed alongside DSLR and mirrorless cameras. Its bokeh has a characteristic swirling pattern that some photographers love. Plus, Nikon has just announced a 105mm f/1.4 lens that has fans of shallow-focus photography foaming at the mouth with excitement.Īn interesting lens design, resurrected from the past, is the Petzval from Lomography. More recently, Fujifilm has released a special APD version of its 85mm f/1.2 portrait optic, which features an apodization filter that smooths out background blur to a greater degree than the regular version of the lens. And the Mark IV version of Leica’s 35mm f/2 Summicron lens is known as ‘ The King of Bokeh’ amongst Leica collectors. In the early 1990s Nikon released two DC (Defocus Control) lenses designed for phenomenal optical performance and which allow adjustable bokeh. There are some lenses that are known for their good bokeh, and not all are modern. Generating good bokeh is a very technical business. There are other lens design characteristics that help too, including the use of high-quality glass elements that minimize distortions and aberrations. Older lenses do this more than modern ones (pentagons are characteristic of old V-system Hasselblad lenses) since manufacturers now use curved blades to make these diaphragms as close to circular as possible. Sometimes you’ll see polygons in the bokeh instead of circles, with the number of sides corresponding to the number of blades that form the lens’s aperture diaphragm. If they are coarse donut-like circles, then that’s bad. Also look for the circles made by out-of-focus highlights – if these blend nicely into a kind of continuum then that’s very good. If you can see the sharp edge of a blurred tree branch, for example, that’s not good. Out-of-focus regions should be soft, velvety and smooth, and the edges of blurred objects shouldn’t be visible. Thankfully, some aspects of “good bokeh” are agreed on by so many people, that we can take them as gospel. But how can we measure the beauty of something? What is attractive to one person might not be to another. Other optical phenomena, like sharpness, distortion, and light fall-off, can be evaluated and compared. The problem is that, “the attractiveness of out-of-focus areas” is a very subjective concept, which makes bokeh a very hard thing to quantify. It has acquired such a cult status that the term “bokelicious” has even become a regular catchphrase for one YouTube presenter. ![]() ![]() It is used by lens manufacturers as a marketing term, as well as by those who review and test lenses for the photography press. The English word, “bokeh” comes from a mixture of two Japanese words: boke and boke-aji which, roughly translated, refers to, “the visual appeal of the out-of-focus areas of a photograph.” It was first used in the American magazine, PHOTO Technique in 1997, and this defined the spelling “bokeh” to help readers pronounce it correctly: bo- as in “bone” and -keh as in “Kenneth”.įast forward to 2016, and bokeh is everywhere. It is also a term that is shrouded in myth it is often confusing to those who claim to understand it. The cover image is by photographer Ronny Skevis.īokeh has become a really important word in photography. ![]() We’ll be telling those stories every week here on 500px ISO and the Red Bull Photography website. Behind every shot on Red Bull Photography is a talented photographer, a wild story, and a few lessons learned. This partnership isn’t just about amazing photography - it’s also about amazing stories. Red Bull Photography recently joined our community with a verified brand profile of their own.
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