"hbw"

[libertango]

Unsurprisingly, it was bohemiancoast who got it right. "hbw" stands for "Happy Bokeh Wednesday." It even has its own pool on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/groups/bokehwednesday/

What I'm guessing is trickier for many people would be, "What the hell is bokeh?" (Let alone, "Why Wednesday?")

Here's the Wikipedia article:

"Bokeh (from the Japanese boke ボケ, "blur") is a photographic term referring to the appearance of out-of-focus areas in an image produced by a camera lens... Although difficult to quantify, some lenses enhance overall image quality by producing more subjectively pleasing out-of-focus areas, referred to as bokeh."

Here's a nice example, from one of the admins of the pool. The strawberries are in focus. The oranges have bokeh.

Comments

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Very cool concept. Thanks for that.

[zannah.livejournal.com]

I ran into this a month or two ago, and I didn't understand how it was different from DoF.

Depth of field vs bokeh

[hal-obrien.livejournal.com]

Depth of field determines what's in focus and what isn't. At f1.8 (my widest lens) the plane of focus is very narrow -- perhaps a few inches. At f64, everything you see in the frame should be in focus.

Bokeh refers to a perceived quality of the just how the blurry, out of focus areas look. Paintings by, say, Monet, Seurat, and Van Gogh could all be said to have an out-of-focus appearance. But the brush strokes -- how they obtain their "out-of-focusness" -- are very different and distinctive.

I will admit that I don't see very many gradations of bokeh, myself. But I also recognize that the blurry bits from 1970s pictures (which used narrow DoF far more often, in my memory), look different from those today. I'm resistant to chalking that up solely to blurring through digital means. Which leaves the lenses as the main variable.