Bokeh
The aesthetic quality of the blur produced in the out-of-focus parts of an image.
In depth
Bokeh (from the Japanese word for 'blur') isn't just about a blurry background; it's about the quality of that blur. Good bokeh is creamy and smooth, often with circular highlights, achieved by using large apertures.
Example
“The Christmas lights in the background turned into soft, glowing orbs, creating beautiful bokeh behind the actor.”
Origin and history
The English-language adoption of 'bokeh' is generally traced to the 1990s photography press, which borrowed the Japanese word 'boke' to give photographers a vocabulary for something they had long observed but rarely discussed: the character of out-of-focus areas. Cinematographers had been chasing the same effect for decades — anamorphic lenses from the 1950s and 1960s are prized today partly because of their distinctive oval bokeh — but the term itself only became mainstream in the digital era.
Why filmmakers use it
Bokeh is one of the few visual cues that immediately reads as 'cinematic' to a general audience. It separates the subject from the environment, isolates emotion, and signals that a shot was made with deliberate craft rather than a phone camera's deep focus. Cinematographers choose lenses specifically for their bokeh signature: vintage glass for soft, painterly blur; modern primes for clean, geometric highlights; anamorphic lenses for the streaky ovals associated with blockbuster cinema.
More examples in cinema
- Roger Deakins' work on '1917' uses lens choices that produce smooth, rounded bokeh on background lights to keep the eye locked on the soldiers in the foreground.
- Music videos shot at night frequently exploit traffic lights and signage to fill the frame with circular bokeh highlights.
Common confusion
Bokeh is not simply 'blur' or 'depth of field.' Depth of field describes how much of the scene is in focus; bokeh describes the visual character of the parts that are not.