Bokeh

Some of you have asked what bokeh is... so I'm going to show you!

Admittedly, I'm not an expert on this, so I'll send you to someone who actually knows what she's talking about first. :) Here's a really good explanation of bokeh and some amazing bokeh pictures. The Pioneer Woman is easily my favorite blogger ever.

Okay, so now for the inexpert explanation! Basically with a camera lens, there's a little hole that lets in the light. This is the aperture. The bigger you make the aperture, the fuzzier the background is. It lets you focus really well on your main subject and separates them from the stuff behind them (aka "depth of field"). So, basically, bokeh is just when the background fuzzes into beautiful little bubbles of color.

Like this!

This is bokeh by itself. Obviously, you wouldn't want to hang that up in your living room -- bokeh exists to showcase things, objects, foregrounds... otherwise it just kind of looks like you got the wrong glasses prescription.

All I did with these was manually adjust the focus on my lens. Twist until fuzzy, then click. If you have a point-and-shoot, you can achieve a similar effect by using the macro function, getting your camera to focus on something up close (hold the button down halfway until a green light appears) and then move the camera and look at something else before you click it. It basically does the same thing.

There's the same-ish picture in focus. The horse moved. Darn horse.

Obviously, that's a boring foreground.. but for the sake of bokeh, it's nice. See how the background isn't just fuzzy, it's almost bubbly? That's bokeh.

Again with the awful foreground (really should have picked something that was a different color than the background) but I LOVE the bokeh in this one! The light and the green played really nicely together.

Weird focus, but love the bokeh. Are you noticing how different colors make it look better? The more variation you have in the background (with light, of course) the more interesting the bokeh is.

Last grass bokeh, promise. I like how the bokeh isn't quite circular on parts of this. The lighter foreground on the darker background also makes the focus pop (haha, good job, self!). But, but, see how the bokeh isn't as intense in this one as in the last one? That's cause this one is directly in the sun, while in the previous one the sun was at a different angle. Lesson learned: move around a lot.

I go back and forth with this one. It isn't quite bokeh, but I like it anyway. Do you see how the flowers that are in "focus" (I know it's blurry) look further away from the fuzzy background? That's why we use the bigger aperture. Fuzziness and distance.

While the bokeh isn't as intense in this one, it still achieves the desired effect: puts the focus directly on the subject (in this case, the pretty purple flowers) and puts "distance" between the background and the foreground.

That, in a nutshell, is bokeh! Make more sense now?

Now go out and take pictures! Make bokeh! Then show them to me! (really, if you have bokeh pictures, I want to see them. We could start a facebook group for bokeh-addicts.)

xo -- eo