Sipping Designs

Project 365: Day 39 With Extreme Bokeh

Nowadays I see bokeh everywhere. I cannot watch TV or movies or even drive a car without noticing bokeh circles all over the place. It’s a disease!

On Monday (8th of February, day 39 of my 365) I was sitting in my car in traffic lights, waiting for the green light. It was snowing and the snow flakes melted on the windshield. I stared at the red light and noticed that the melting snow flakes made nice bokeh effect when I didn’t focus on them.

So, in the evening I went to sit into my car again (the car was safely in the parking lot) and took a few photos of the windshield bokeh. The white balance is set based on the light in the car. The lamp posts outside gave the turquoise touch to the photo. I added only a hint of light in Camera RAW.

Click on the photo on the left to see it in larger size.

You can also follow my Project 365 photo stream in Flickr.

Bokeh

According to Wikipedia:

…bokeh is the blur, or the aesthetic quality of the blur, in out-of-focus areas of an image, or “the way the lens renders out-of-focus points of light.”

‘Bokeh’ can be seen in two ways: some think that bokeh is only the round shaped out-of-focus spots but some think that all out-of-focus (blurry) areas are bokeh. In this article I’m referring to the round shaped spots when I mention bokeh.

Bokeh can be good or bad. Lens’ aperture size and shape affect to the quality and look of the bokeh. Some lenses are good or great bokeh lenses while other are worse. For example, the bokeh of my modernish Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D lens is usually swirly and chaotic but the bokeh of my old Nikon Series E 50mm f/1.8 AI-S lens from the 1980s is usually round and pretty (or at least rounder and prettier).

Usually there are the in-focus areas and the out-of-focus areas in a photo. The more the area is out-of-focus, the stronger the blur is. Bokeh is formed if there are lighter or glowing spots in the out-of-focus area. The further away the spots are from the in-focus area, the stronger the bokeh is.

Yesterday I went for a short walk and intentionally took a few out-of-focus photos. The photos below are taken with the Nikon Series E 50mm f/1.8 AI-S lens (wide open) and they have not been post-processed in any way except for the resizing. To create effects like in the photos below you just need to manually focus to the front of the light sources. The more you focus forward, the bigger the bokeh circles are.

Christmas lights (21 / 365 of Project 365)

Colorful Christmas lights

Lights by the road