Bokeh (pronounced bok-uh or bo-kay) is all about the blur in the background of a photo, and, more specifically, the quality of that blur.
The term comes from the Japanese word boke, which means blur.
Bokeh is often used to refer to the circular orbs created by out of focus light – and that is the emphasis for this challenge (it can sometimes refer to background blur in it’s entirety, but we recently had a challenge for shallow depth of field and blurred backgrounds)
An introduction:
Some tutorials and inspiration:
- How to create custom shaped bokeh:
(Heads up – next week’s challenge will be eyes)
Here are some bokeh examples from our cluster galleries. All of these examples have blurred balls in the background:
Thanks to Will T for this suggestion.
You have until next Tuesday to upload your image to Cluster. Members have all been sent an invitation to join and most have done so already. If you have any trouble feel free to email Esther. We also encourage you to leave encouraging comments for other members.
I would love to receive your suggestions/requests for future challenges. Please leave them as a comment under the challenge notification in Cluster or Facebook.
We will also post this competition on our “Friends of BCC” Facebook group so our friends can still participate by sharing their images on Facebook.