Bokeh: the out of focus, “blurry” parts of the image as rendered by the camera

Takashi Kitajima is a Japanese photographer who take cityscape images, utilizing bokeh with Tokyo’s bright lights.

 

Increasing the blur of a photo can be as easy as adjusting the lens to be out of focus, but this creates blur over the entire image. In order to focus the blur like with bokeh, you have to use a wide aperture – eg, f/1.4 to create shallow depth of field. This shallow depth of field puts objects in the foreground and background in blur.

If possible, I want to be able to take pictures with bokeh, however as it is easiest with lights and I am very close to my subject, I may have to find other methods to induce an image that is out of focus. I am considering using extreme foreground to do so.

 

Pictorialist Movement

• photo by Alfred Steiglitz

In the Pictorialist movement, to create the blurred effect they often used vaseline. By putting vaseline on the edges of the lens, photographers could blur the image, decreasing the (what was considered) unnatural sharpness. This technique of vaseline could effectively control the areas that were blurred as well. This fixes the issue with bokeh, where only the foreground and background could be blurred. Instead, the position of blurring is dependent on where vaseline is applied.