Ahhh, good you changed the title, because they are two different things. 😉
May 12, 2023
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I disagree. Both images show background blur. The quality of the blur ( the “bokeh”) is different in each. The second image shows “bokeh balls” which are simply the image of the lens diaphragm caused by OOF specular highlights a certain distance from the lens.
Rich
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I’ve always understood bokeh to be a term for the aesthetic quality of the blurry bits. It is inaccurate to ask how much bokeh you'll get. It's defined by quality, not quantity.
The term “bokeh” was made popular in the late 1990s by Mike Johnston, the editor of Photo Techniques magazine, who produced a series of articles on the subject for his publication. Based on the Japanese term “boke-aji,” it was used to describe the quality of the blurry or hazy portions of a photograph. The term quickly weaseled its way into the lexicon of desirable lens attributes. The funny thing is, many photographers still aren’t quite clear as to what bokeh really is.
ᔥ Bokeh: A Term that Means More than Blurry and Fuzzy | B&H eXplora
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100% agree Rich, no arguments there, but they are two different things and both have to do with the lens or the aperture. We can change Bokeh, it's not hard.
Heck we only have to google the term Bokeh and look what turns up.
That's why one image has "Bokeh" under it and the other one doesn't, it's just a blur. I'm pretty sure I know what it is.
It's not rocket science.
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The really funny things is that the term bokeh is widely used to refer to the blur itself, among its other uses. Yet, a few people insist that its real meaning is what one individual in ancient times had in mind, not what the actual use is.
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Hardly ancient times, the term only became known to western photographers within the last dozen years. People who know it's original meaning fight to maintain that because if the they only mean 'shallow DOF', or 'blurred background' these phrases describe that perfectly, while there isn't a convenient short phrase to describe what bokeh means, it requires a sentence.
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Do you know what the original meaning of a "car" was?
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I'm glad this discussion has been moved into Beginners' Questions Discussion. Thank you to whoever moved it.
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I have noticed that the photographic community has some stark disagreements on the definition of bokeh.
Merriam-Webster online dictionary gives the definition: "the blurred quality or effect seen in the out-of-focus portion of a photograph taken with a narrow depth of field"
Most other dictionaries I have looked at use broadly similar definitions.
However, one photography website (thelenslounge.com) says: "Bokeh is the out of focus blur of specular highlights and appears (usually) as circular shapes in an out of focus background or foreground." and also: "Many photographers mistakenly think that background blur (or foreground blur) is bokeh."
I have noticed some other tutorials on the web that similarly reserve use of the word bokeh for the blur produced by small points of light that are out of focus. That also seems to be the definition used by nzmacro earlier in this thread.
Well, which is it?
(I'm going to keep out of this argument as it seems bizarre to me.)
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So we might say "the background blur has good bokeh", but not "the image has bokeh"
Not unlike resolution ... "my csmera has resolution" makes little sense, eh?
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Bokeh can be good or bad, but always is.
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In the end it's historical. The term was introduced into the photographic jargon in 1997 by Mike Johnson, specifically to mean the quality of the blur. It was in a series of articles about Japanese practice where particular lenses were becoming prized not for the amount of that blur but the quality of the blur. As is usually the case, if someone sees an unfamiliar word without a definition they do their best to extrapolate the meaning. As a result many people started using it to mean the blur itself, rather than the quality of the blur. There was already a word for blur, which is 'blur'. This usage of 'bokeh' is thus somewhat redundant, but remains common. In the interests of reducing unnecessary esoteric jargon my own view is that it's better to use the word 'blur' when you mean blur. But both senses are now common.
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It was me. I split the thread so that the contribution that you made for the information of beginners is still in BQ, but the surrounding discussion is in BQD. That will be the normal practice.
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Cool style - kind of a haiku ...
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When splitting a thread it would be nice to add a link to the original thread. This thread starts with a post that makes little sense without it. Just a thought.
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Good idea.
Alan
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or effect..., i.e., the blur itself.
