The Beautiful Blur

Have you ever heard the term “bokeh” before? If you are a photographer, you most probably did or not. If you are not a camera-holic and photo addict, you might say: what is this thing? Well, you will now learn the beauty that is bokeh.

                Fist off, bokeh is pronounced as boh-ke. This English spelling is sometimes pronounces as bo (bone) and ke (Kentucky) with both syllables having equal stress. It is a Japanese term which literally translates to blur and or haze. It is spelled boke but it later became more popular in the US and in the world as bokeh. The term, bokeh, was made popular in the year 1997 through the magazine named “Photo Techniques”.

                Bokeh, as you know by now, is a technique in photography that catches the beauty of blurs or hazes in images. The aesthetic quality of a bokeh is captured by taking out-of-focus areas of the image. Bokeh photographs usually involve lights, trees and leaves: things that retain beauty even when blurred or hazed. Many professionals would refer to bokeh as how the camera lens captures or renders out-of-focus areas in an image that makes it look appealing and not just some mistake.

                However, bokeh is a particularly tricky technique. You see almost everyone and anyone who has a camera can produce bokeh images. But, are they good? Are they professionally done? Are they captured in such a way that it is not threatening in the eyes? Is it rendered well? Did it enhance the image or just plainly ruined it? These are some of the things that you have to answer in order for you to say that the blurs of the photograph are really intended and are thus bokeh or are they just a mere mistake or slip of the hand. There are many photographs out there that contain blurry or hazy photos, but they are not bokeh. They are just so because of the mistake done by its taker: a slight movement of the hand or a movement of the subject but not because the taker (photographer) intended the image to be blurry. Real bokeh photographs bring out beauty in its main subject.

                If you wanted to create a bokeh photograph but do not know how, then stop creasing your forehead and stop being a worry wart for we have got the solution for you. If you have a good quality camera (even if it is not SLR and just the ordinary digital camera that is of good quality, you can do this) and an eye for beauty and a pinch of a creative mind, you can certainly start your bokeh photography. Here are a few tips that you can use to enhance your bokeh photographs:

Tip 1:  Set to aperture priority. If you know how to tweak your camera settings, you can do this easily. If not, then, try to consult your camera’s user manual for its setting and find the aperture priority setting there. Make sure to set your useful camera to aperture priority.

Tip 2: If you are using a larger aperture camera, use quite a low f-stop number. This can be from f1.4, f1.8 or even f2.8.

Tip 3: Get as far away from the background. You see, you would not need to do a close-up shot in bokeh photography. In fact, this is not a close-up shot at all. Imagine a blurry close-up shot of something. Would it not be weird? The farther you are from the backgroung, the better. But do not go really far for that will also ruin the image. Just get some feet or meters away from the background.

Tip 4: Set the shutter speed. The secret to blurry photos is the shutter speed. Set your camera’s shutter speed to more than 1/50 second. Faster shutter speed is better. You see, once the shutter speed gets lower than 1/50 second, the background lights get mixed up with the actual background and you would not get those small circles. Also, it would help to increase the ISO level of your camera if the image gets too dark.

Tip 5: Get close to the subject. Yes, you need to get as far from the background as possible but you also need to get as close to the subject as possible. Now this is hard. But, just be patient and you will get the right distance soon enough.

Tip 6: Make sure that the background is lit. For the bokeh to be effective, the background must have sufficient light to achieve those colorful and beautiful little blurs.