Yes, bokeh is an actual word. It’s Japanese, and stands for “fuzzy” or “blurry”, and that’s more or less how most people like bokeh to appear on their photographs. Let’s take a look at where and what this bokeh is.
How To Control Bokeh
First of all, when we say “whoa, this photograph has nice bokeh”, we’re usually referring to that the background/foreground is nicely blurred, and doesn’t steal any attention from your main subject. In the image below though, bokeh does somewhat steal the attention, but it makes the overall photograph look much more awesome.
So, how to change it? Unfortunately there isn’t like a direct bokeh button anywhere on your camera, but it’s related to a couple of things.
- Lens Quality – Prime lenses tend to have much better bokeh, due to their higher quality elements.
- Aperture Size – The bigger your aperture opening, the nicer the bokeh. At f/1.4, it will appear more out of focus than at f/4, f/5.6 and so on (related to depth of field).
- Distance – The further away your subject is from the background, the more out of focus your background will be.
Basically, the only way you can control it with your current gear is to mess with the depth of field and see what gives better results. If you have enough money though, the best thing would be to buy a high quality lens, and I recommend Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 and EF 85mm f/1.8 for those of you who shoot with Canon DSLR cameras. For Nikon, there are two cheap options as well; the Nikon 50mm f/1.8G and 35mm f/1.8.
All 4 lenses mentioned above are obviously not just for bokeh, I recommend them to everyone who owns a DSLR camera and wants to spend as little as possible to get awesome results.
Best Lenses For Beautiful Bokeh
[ezcol_1half]1. Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 STM2. Canon EF 85mm f/1.8 USM
3. Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM[/ezcol_1half] [ezcol_1half_end]1. Nikon 50mm f/1.8G AF-S
2. Nikon 35mm f/1.8G AF-S DX
3. Nikon 50mm f/1.4G SIC SW AF-S [/ezcol_1half_end]
All 6 lenses above are from $200 to $400, so they’re really affordable!
Here’s a more everyday example, with “soft” looking bokeh, which is what you’ll usually want. The more aperture blades your lens has, the nicer it will look, so keep that in mind when buying a new one!