Bokeh! Got to be one of the weirdest terms in photography It is only beaten by scheimpflug (ability to get your focus plane to any angle you like on a large format camera) and mackie line (helps make your film images sharper by developing the edges more). But more to the point. What is Bokeh and why do we love it.

When looking at lens reviews you might come across the reviewer talking about the ‘buttery soft’, ‘swirly’ or even ‘donut’ bokeh. In this article we’d like to explain about it and why you might need to be interested in it – or not, for your travel photography.

Don’t stress the Bokeh stuff

Bokeh (pronounced BOH kay) is the aesthetic quality of the blur in the out-of-focus areas of your images. The narrower the depth of field (bigger the aperture), the more out of focus areas you get. So Bokeh being an aesthetic quality means that it is subjective and nothing is right or wrong. This is a big relief as it means we don’t have to get bokeh ‘right’, just ‘how we want it’. Phew….

Types of bokeh

Bokeh can be described in all sorts of creative ways so here are some of the more popular adjectives that people use to describe it:

• buttery
• donut
• swirly
• grainy
• circular or oval
• hexagonal

The type of bokeh and the smoothness of it, is a product of the construction of the lens. Both glass and the aperture blades will have an effect on the bokeh. The round look on the previous photograph is down to the blades (10) on the Leica Summicron lens I was using. More blades give you rounder out-of-focus highlights. Round blades will compensate for less blades to give more round highlights.

A mirror lens that uses mirrors rather than glass will give you extreme donut highlights.

Image with small aperture so no noticeable bokeh

When the same image is defocused the soft buttery bokeh in the out-of-focus areas complement the hexagonal bokeh highlights

What and how Bokeh does the job

So bokeh is the quality of the out of focus area. The out-of-focus bit can add so much to an image, but one of its main ‘jobs’ is to make the background appear separate from sharp foreground subjects. This could be to separate the person you photographed from a busy background, or to create a sense of depth in a cityscape or landscape. We use this technique a lot in our night photography as it allows us to create beautiful out-of-focus highlights.

Ally used an aperture of f8 on these mushrooms in Wivenhoe woods, Essex to isolate the subject while still keeping them in focus

Ally used an aperture of f4 on her portrait of Idris inside Truth Coffee in Cape Town, S Africa

On the image above, the out-of-focus lights and metals of all the steam punk paraphernalia give a beautiful backdrop to her portrait of Idris at Truth Coffee … is it the best coffee shop in the world!

To create more out-of-focus areas you need to have your subject a reasonable distance from the background and then use a wide aperture on your lens. (The smaller the aperture number, the wider the aperture is eg, f16 is a small aperture while f2.8 is wide.)

Lastly

Bokeh is a fashionable word at the moment. Sometimes people pour over images, drooling over the bokeh or criticising it at the expense of the content of the image. It is not nearly as important as lens reviewers would have you believe. The most important thing is the image – not the quality of the out-of-focus areas.

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In the centre of Cape Town in South Africa, the Mother City, is an unassuming coffee shop with a tiny, easily missed, sign outside saying Truth. So what is the truth? Is this the worlds best coffee shop? Like the true coffee desperados we are, we couldn’t wait to get in to find out.

When you enter, you enter an amazing ‘steampunk’ world of metal and pipes, airships and air pirates, old instruments and cogs. Everything is authentic. not a piece of plastic in sight. The staff are dressed appropriately and could not be more helpful. (They are also very happy to pose for photographs.)

On to the coffee – this strange coffee restaurant has a reputation of being the ‘best coffee house in the world’ and it certainly lived up to it. As coffee-holics, we can testify it really is superb and the food is also amazing.

Truth Coffee bar

Whilst in there, wander around and take in the details. Even a trip to the toilet is a ‘steampunk bathroom experience’ from the solid metal doors to the authentic taps and bowls.

Truth steampunk design with fittings

The magical mystical tour

Whilst sitting at our table revelling in the awesome coffee and food smells one of the staff came up to us and in a very low voice whispered. “Would you like to visit the bean chamber?”  Now whilst this sounded more like something out of Harry Potter we jumped at the chance. Groove, (that is the coolest name I’ve ever come across), took us around the back to where all the magic happens. Piles of sacks of coffee beans mix with odd items, (old gramophones, weird lights and a vintage bicycle) in the same steampunk theme. A 100-year old coffee roaster and work areas compete for space in the dim light. This is where the experimentation of different blends takes place in an almost mystical way! A lot of these images were crying out to be made into black and white – see our guide on what makes a good black & white photo.

100 year old coffee roaster

Photography

Photographing in Truth was a bit of a challenge as everything is very very dark. Slow shutter speeds and caffeine to steady the hand was the order of the day as we didn’t have tripods with us. The back room tour was a wonderful surprise. I steadied the camera on anything I could, but still did most of the images at 1600 ISO. The above image was 1/60 sec at f4. We both love Black and White photography as we started our photographic career on film, so we converted a number of the images to black and white with a subtle split tone. This technique gives a really moody feel that suits the dark coffee roasting area so very well. Have a look at Tim’s video explaining best practice in converting from colour to black and white in only 30 seconds.

Groove testing the best coffee blends at Truth

So is Truth the best coffee house in the world? Whilst steampunk is not for everyone, we couldn’t get enough of it, so our vote is a definite “YES”.

Truth Coffee is a quirky, award-winning, steampunk themed restaurant for exclusive coffee, that is not to be missed. To see more of Truth and what they do best, visit them here.

Whilst in Cape Town, take in the other attractions. Read our post on the sunset trip up to Table Mountain. We also highly recommend a trip to Robben Island and Nelson Mandela’s cell.

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