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WHAT IS BOKEH?

Bokeh describes the rendition of out-of-focus points of light.

Bokeh is different from sharpness. Sharpness is what happens at the point of best focus. Bokeh is what happens away from the point of best focus.

Bokeh describes the appearance, or "feel," of out-of-focus areas. Bokeh is not how far something is out-of-focus, bokeh is the character of whatever blur is there.

Unfortunately good bokeh doesn't happen automatically in lens design. Perfect lenses render out-of-focus points of light as circles with sharp edges. Ideal bokeh would render each of these points as blurs, not hard-edged circles. Mathematicians would say the intensity distribution of the blur circles are rectangular in perfect lenses, and good bokeh would prefer a Gaussian distribution. This is one area in which physics doesn't mirror what we want artistically.

Differing amounts of spherical aberration alter how lenses render out-of-focus points of light, and thus their bokeh. The word "bokeh" comes from the Japanese word "boke" (pronounced bo-keh) which literally means fuzziness or dizziness.

A technically perfect lens has no spherical aberration. Therefore a perfect lens focuses all points of light as cones of light behind the lens. The image is in focus if the film is exactly where the cone reaches its finest point. The better the lens, the tinier this point gets.

If the film is not exactly where that cone of light reaches its smallest point, then that point of the image is not in focus. Then that point is rendered on film as a disk of light, instead instead of as a point. This disc is also called the "blur circle," or "circle of confusion" by people calculating depth-of-field charts. In a lens with no spherical aberration this blur circle is an evenly illuminated disc. Out of focus points all look like perfect discs with sharp edges. (OK, at smaller apertures where the image is in pretty good focus you may see additional "Airy" rings around the circle, but that's a diffraction pattern we're not discussing here.) This isn't optimal for bokeh, since as you can imagine the sharp edge of these discs can start to give definition to things intended to be out-of-focus.

There are no perfect lenses, so one usually does not see these perfect discs.

Real lenses have some degree of spherical aberration. This means that in practice, even though all the light coming through the lens from a point on the subject may meet at a nice, tiny point on the film, that the light distribution within the cone itself may be uneven. Yes, we are getting abstract here, which is why some denser photographers refuse to try understand bokeh.

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