"Bokeh"

It's the quality of the out-of-focus area behind the subject. Some lenses can render this smooth and creamy with no jarring highlights, while others may appear cluttered and distracting. As I understand it, the quality of bokeh is a function of lens design as well a shooting conditions (e.g., generally tending toward its best quality on a telephoto lens with a comparatively large aperture opening). Lenses generally acknowledged to have outstanding bokeh include the Canon 200mm f/2 and Canon 85mm f/1.2 at their maximum aperture.

All I'm saying is that pros don't use the work "bokeh". I understand that different lenses have different out-of-focus qualities. It's a word that Flickr made up, it seems. Usually it is used in the form of a question, "How do I get awesome bokeh?"

Thank you Stephen for the great explanation.

It's often neglected but the more subtle aspect of bokeh is not just in how the way-out-of-focus areas are rendered but it's the entire transition from sharp to out-of-focus... including the main subject. It's a valid consideration in choosing a lens. This particular professional does use the term (if only occasionally).

What the heck is "bokeh"? The word looks retarded and sounds dumb.

Well, in fact if you say it the wrong (or right?) way in Japan, it means "knucklehead." ;-)

FAIW, I'm a pro who uses the word "bokeh" if/when it's relevant to what I'm discussing. I don't consider myself stupid. The reason you perceive it as being a stupid word is that most people who use it have no idea what it really means.

Nate: You are soon to feel the wrath of the Bokian Insurgency! 'Bokeh', from the Japanese boké (blur) is IMO a somewhat pretentious word for--blur, or the quality thereof. The Cult of the Bokians was founded in 1992 (or 93) by Mike Johnston, quondam columnist at this site and elsewhere. The word is now so much misused--"Does the Canikon 80mm f1.5 have bokeh?"--that it is losing any meaning it may once have had. (Search dpreview.com for 'bokeh'.) "Awesome Bokeh" = "Smooth Blur". Since lens quality is only one component affecting blur in an image, the Bokian veneration of particular lenses is frequently carried to extremes. "Wow! Now that I have the Nokkoff 57mm f0.94, my banal snapshots of my cat have, like, AWESOME bokeh!"

I can't complain about the Bokians Les, my lens sales on fleabay have never been better!

Also, "bokeh" is a term that has mostly been used by the motion picture industry until now. Cinematographers are keenly aware of the bokeh of the lenses they're using. Only the other day, I was watching a film in which the lens rendered the background lights in a night scene quite harshly around the edges, indicating overcorrection for spherical aberration. I thought that was quite an unusual lens choice and that a lens with a more neutral bokeh would have been a better choice. And then I re-thought. I realized that this sort of lens would render OOF areas closer than the plane of focus with a softer bokeh and hypothesized that there would soon be some important OOF elements introduced there. Sure enough, a conversation quickly surfaced, in which the nearest person was OOF with his back to the camera, rendered with "good" bokeh, the person who was talking was in focus and facing the camera, and the background lights were rendered with ordinarily "bad" bokeh. However, in balance, the whole thing made sense. I really enjoy reading the technical aspects apparent in cinematography. One can learn a lot about still photography from watching and analyzing a good movie. ;-)

"I think you mean "DEPTH OF FIELD"."

Don't you really mean Shallowness of Field?

>>> The word looks retarded and sounds dumb.

The use of the word "retarded" in that context is very insensitive.