From the Japanese term Boke, which means “blur” or “haze”, Bokeh is basically a way to describe the atheistic quality of an out of focus area of an image. Bokeh occurs for parts of the scene that lie outside the depth of field. Typically you’ll see this in portraiture where the out of focus areas are normally in the foreground.

There has been a growing trend in the last few years for heavy Bokeh areas in the foreground of images. Used creatively these areas can not only help to enhance the composition of the images but they only add and extra sense of depth to the whole scene.

Due to the popularity of speciality lenses such as the LensBaby, Bokeh isn’t limited a particular ‘plane’ of focus, nor is the quality of the Bokeh areas.

There is of course lots of examples of using different shaped apertures for effect, but what’s most interested me recently is the use of this extreme, almost see-through, style of foreground Brokeh.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about…

How to get this effect

Here’s what I used in the foreground…

I chose these flowers not only because there was a nice mix of colours but they weren’t densely bunched together. This meant that I could achieve that see-through effect.

The image was shot on a 70-200 lens and the aperture was about f4.

For these type of shots the faster the glass the better. Had I shot the image on f2.8 or better I might have not only achieved a Bokeh effect in the foreground but there might have been some in the background too.

This would have achieved what I like to call a Bokeh Sandwich.

It’s also fairly important to get nice and close to what you intend to blur in the foreground, typically foliage is great for Bokeh whether it occurs in the foreground or background.

A really great tool you might want to utilise is the Depth of Field Calculator from DOF Master.

There’s also a very handy iPhone app you might want to use out on location. There are a few DOF apps out there but what I like about this one is that you can choose what type of camera body you have (full frame etc).

Examples

There’s some really great photographers out there using these sort of techniques in their portraiture…. here’s a couple I really like….

Maryanne Hawes (Light and Day Photography) has some wonderful examples in a recent post on her blog - CLAIRE DARCY-BOWEN

There’s also some good examples at the Mckinley-Rodgers blog – Lovebirds: Stacey & Luke