Why a web page devoted to Bokeh?
I am creating this website because, while there are multiple excellent websites to evaluate lenses based on MTF, or subjective quality factor, I have not found a particularly good resource for evaluating lenses based on their Bokeh. For those of you out there that do not know what Bokeh is, I will try to make this a good educational tool about this often (surprisingly) misunderstood property of images. I do mostly landscape photography, and have for years, and as such, I often shoot at f/11 or f/16, as I want everything to be sharp throughout the frame, and therefore for me, Bokeh is relatively unimportant. Or at least, it was not important until I had a child and starting doing lots of portrait pictures. On a trip to Cold Spring, NY, I took some pictures of my daughter sitting in a field of grass with pink flower petals all over. The looked great to my eye. But when I printed the pictures, the background drew my attention away. All these sharp points of light all over, circles colliding, sharp edges, double lines. I had never really noticed this before, but I felt it really detracted from the picture. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had been introduced to the world of Bokeh.