Bokeh. It’s a real word that I did not make up.

Do you know what a bokeh is? It is not a I Can Haz Cheezburger-type animal (like a kitteh or puppeh or bunneh). Here’s the definition from Wikipedia:

In photography, bokeh is the blur, or the aesthetic quality of the blur, in out-of-focus areas of an image. Bokeh has been defined as “the way the lens renders out-of-focus points of light”. However, differences in lens aberrations and aperture shape cause some lens designs to blur the image in a way that is pleasing to the eye, while others produce blurring that is unpleasant or distracting—”good” and “bad” bokeh, respectively. Bokeh occurs for parts of the scene that lie outside the depth of field.

The term comes from the Japanese word boke, which means “blur” or “haze”, or boke-aji, the “blur quality”. The Japanese term boke is also used in the sense of a mental haze or senility. The term bokashi is related, meaning intentional blurring or gradation.

Here’s a great example of bokeh:

But what I didn’t realize is by putting a thingie with a shape cut out of it over your lens you can control the shapes of the bokeh circles.

You could have butterflies or hearts or snowflakes, any shape you could think of.

But today I saw the best thing using a bokeh ever. Check this out.

Isn’t that the greatest?!! You could make a movie where some kind of mystical creatures are flying and all you have to do is cut a bokeh out of cardboard (there are many tutorials online) and choreograph your friends to wave lights around. So awesome!

One Response to “Bokeh. It’s a real word that I did not make up.”

  1. Your Sister Kay Who Is In Awe of Your Awesomeness says:

    Well, I’m still your sister Kay and I’m still in Awe of Your Awesomeness.

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