What is “bokeh” in photography, in laymans terms?
Bokeh is a phonetic spelling of the Japanese word “boke” which means “blur” Wikipedia has a great entry on it, i’ll only copy&paste the summary, it can be found here: “Although difficult to quantify, some lenses enhance overall image quality by producing more subjectively pleasing out-of-focus areas, referred to as bokeh. Bokeh is especially important for large-aperture lenses, macro lenses, and long telephoto lenses because they are typically used with a shallow depth of field. Bokeh is also important for “portrait lenses” (typically medium telephoto — 85–150 mm on 35-mm format) because the photographer would typically select a shallow depth of field (wide aperture) to achieve an out of focus background and make the subject stand out.” source:
