Originally published at: The reason why Bokeh is spelled with an "h" at the end | Boing Boing
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… so pretty much the reason we’d have guessed
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I had no idea that that was a word in English. And the h at the end makes it look like anything but Japanese.
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In Canada we just call it boke, eh?
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There was someone on a forum I was on who kept buying Soviet Bokeh lenses, and I wondered if it was a Russian word.
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ボケ meaning dumb or unaware (it originated as a word for dementia) uses a different kanji. Although they are both regularly written in katakana because both characters are difficult ones.
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If it ain’t bokeh; don’t fix it.
“Dude”? That’s fetch.
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Butoh?
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But one needs to really focus on the subject, to get one’s bokeh right.
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When you are worthy enough to use fancy words: …
example 1: I was using my Nikon DS923 with aluminum rails and magnoflex backscatter dynoscrumper, and after reviewing on the 32" iRetnaMacPro noticed all my shots have this amazingly gradiant Bokeh… I swear they were gallery-worthy auteur masterpieces.
example 2: My disposable Kodak’s plastic lens shot all the pictures out of focus but my mom still put them on the fridge.
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Way before the word bokeh was used in America, I heard the effect referred to as “blown out” (more referring to the resulting image, not a specific quality of the lens), e.g. “that background is really blown out.”
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Back when I was learning film photography I never heard the word. It never really came up for me until I started hanging out in digital photography forums.
Forget how or why it’s spelled that way, the bigger question has always been how the heck to you pronounce it.
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It’s B-U-C-K-E-T , pronounced "Bouquet "!
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An h is sometimes tacked onto an o (and only an o) in romanization to indicate an elongated oh sound.
This convention has fallen out of favor recently, so people with names like Saitou (the u serves just to elongate the o, so it is not an ow sound) just go with Saito instead of Saitoh these days.
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I always wondered why I had never heard the term while studying photography as an undergrad yet I started seeing it in widespread use. I assumed it was somehow a term so technical we didn’t get into it as an undergrad, but it had somehow been popularized because of something having to do with digital media - it frankly didn’t occur to me that the word had only just entered into English usage from Japanese.
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People think English doesn’t use diacritical marks, but it does, and we’d have less trouble pronouncing words if we used them more. The diaeresis helps New Yorker readers distinguish living in a coöp from living in a coop, and the macron, blessēdly, tells us when a vowel is both long and not silent. Outside of hymns, you only see it in Japanese words like Shintō, so perhaps folx assume it’s a special Japanese accent, but if you think about it that wouldn’t make much sense. Anyway, it would have been better if we’d spelled it “bokē” all along.
I guess people find these things hard to type, although it’s been easy to do diaereses on a Mac since at least the nineties, and people sometimes use an acute accent in place of a macron, which kind of half works, though the closer French accent would be a grave. On modern smarts phone, all diacritics are easy to type, so it is time to bring them back with a vēngeänce.
See, if someone just told me a photo was “blown out” I would think they meant “overexposed.”
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It’s not just the background blur, it’s the quality of the blur.
So, what is a good or beautiful bokeh? A good bokeh pleases our eyes and our perception of the image and therefore, the background blur should appear soft and “creamy”, with smooth round circles of light and no hard edges. Here is an example of beautiful bokeh rendered by the Nikon 85mm f/1.4D lens:
Pay attention to the smooth background behind the child’s face. The out-of-focus areas look creamy and the circles are round and soft with beautiful transitions between the blurry areas. That’s exactly what you would call good bokeh!
How about bad or ugly bokeh? Although a lot of people argue that there is no such thing as a bad bokeh, I still call whatever distracts my eyes “bad”:
The link has the illustrative photographs
The worst bokeh, from what I can tell by these interminable discussions, is the annular bokeh produced by mirror lenses.
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OK, fine, I’ll do it…
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Exactly, that “h” at the end was so unconventional that I figured it pre-dated the conventional Romanji schema, perhaps going back to the Jesuits. Now that I think about it, the “h” at the end of Bokeh feels like the Inglorious Bastards “German vs British 3 glasses” scene, where I should have known all along that it wasn’t spelled by a Japanese person, because they would’ve never spelled it like that.
I spent 2 years in Highschool photography, where we had a really nice textbook replete with silvery black and white images which I never read, but instead spent those years spooling film into canisters, yucking it up with friends, developing film and then developing photos from the negatives. The whole time I was focused on creating an aesthetic while banging my shins in the dark on the the controls that the textbook would’ve probably explained had I read it. Instead the allure of unlimited 35mm film had me searching for unconventional perspectives, and praying that the images looked anything like what I pictured in my mind’s eye. It wasn’t till I got a DSLR and took a community college class in the aughts, that I ran across the term bokeh, and so I had assumed it was in that mid-90’s photography textbook that I had ignored.
Three cheers for diacritical marks, I totally agree.
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