What is Bokeh effect in Photography

There is no doubt that photography is one of the fastest growing passion among different age of people. They want to try different techniques and tools to enhance their photographic skills. Bokeh is currently fastest growing fads in modern photography. I wonder why they always want to use some fancy words. Bokeh term is used to represent shapes of light which is blurred in the background of photos. But nowadays there is a trend to use filter of different shapes like heart, stars etc to create customized shape of bokeh. These customized shapes are achieved by using bokeh filter over the camera lens.

Bokeh is a photography term derived from the Japanese word for “blur” or “fuzzy”. Bokeh refers to the unfocused background in a photograph. Bokeh filter is a simple filter that clips onto the front end of your lens. This filter blocks out pieces of light that cause the bokeh (blur) effect in your images to take the shape of the filter.

Bokeh filter produces nice shape when you use it with big aperture lens so that foreground will be focus and background out of focus. The more out of focus the background lights are, the better the results will be. Soft and blurred background with smooth edges is considered as a good bokeh. Sharp edge bokeh is usually unpleasant to our eye.

Here is one of the picture I shot in cherry blossoms festival 2010 in Washington DC. You can see bokeh effect on the background where out of focus background images are making fuzzy circles kind of shapes.

Focal Length – 200mm     Aperture – f/6.3     Exposure – 1/640sec     ISO – 200

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