The word ‘bokeh’ is typically mis-used, misunderstood or simply mispronounced. There’s a tendency now to equate ‘bokeh’ with background blur, but they are not the same thing. Blur is blur.
You can have a lot of it or a little, and that’s all related to depth of field, but that doesn’t tell you anything about the visual appearance or quality of that blur. What this blur looks like is ‘bokeh’. You can have ‘good’ bokeh or ‘bad’ bokeh.
Good bokeh is typically creamy and soft and buttery, while bad bokeh is ‘busy’ and there are diffuse halos and outlines around out of focus objects that overlap in a messy and visually confusing way. If that sounds like a rather vague description, then welcome to the world of bokeh. It’s one of those photographic phenomena that can sound like stuff and nonsense until you see it for yourself.
And once you see ‘bad’ bokeh compared to ‘good’ bokeh, you will start to see it everywhere. If you’re not particularly bothered by ‘good’ bokeh and ‘bad’ bokeh it doesn’t make you a poor photographer. Some people are more sensitive to bokeh than others.
You can control the amount of blur in your photo with lens aperture, focal length and distance, and getting ‘good’ bokeh at the same time can simply be a bonus. Bokeh effects are hard to demonstrate unless you have an image with defocused specular highlights or light sources in it. These out-of-focus points will be rendered in different ways, depending on .