Beautiful bokeh

The word ‘bokeh’ can cause some photographers to become irrationally irritable. It’s not just the definition that bothers them, it’s also the pronunciation. Over the years I’ve heard this five-letter word spoken as ‘boo-kay’, boh-kuh’ and ‘boh-key’– sometimes all in the same sentence. I’ll hold my hands up and admit that I’m a repeat offender. To settle the argument, or at least move on, I would like to propose ‘bohkeh’, as suggested by one of Canon’s Japanese-speaking product managers (although he did go on to explain that bokeh is pronounced differently in different areas of Japan!)

With that (kind of) settled, we can move on to what bokeh actually means. Most people use it as a term to describe the rendering of out-of-focus areas in an image – it’s frequently used when talking about backgrounds, but it can also be applied to foreground ‘blur’ too.