Beauty of the Blur

Revealing the aesthetic world of Bokeh photography, where ‘Out of Focus’ blurs create spellbinding underwater images

- Digant Desai

Having photographed subjects using different techniques over the past 7 years, there were images in my mind that I wanted to recreate underwater. Images that looked artistic and beautiful but had a very shallow depth of field and blurred backgrounds. The technique of ‘Bokeh’ was the natural choice as it ticked all the boxes.

Pronounced as ‘Bo-Kay’ or ‘Boke’ the term comes from Japan and means blur or haze referring to the blurred quality in Photographs. It is the aesthetic quality of the blur produced in an out-of-focus part of an image by a lens. When the blurred background has a high aesthetic quality to it the photograph is said to have achieved “good Bokeh”. Even for terrestrial images, isolating a subject while photography is very important, with amateurs and pros going to great lengths to achieve this. Underwater though, things are a little different than on land as one uses lights or strobes for most Bokeh photography. Most photographers when starting out try to get the entire subject and the background in focus. Compact cameras, which have a large depth of field because of their smaller sensors, are very good at this. However, as one’s photography progresses, photographers wish to creatively isolate the subject by getting a blurred background. As mentioned earlier, if the image has a pleasingly blurred background, it is said that the photo has good “Bokeh”. Let us get one thing clear though. Getting black backgrounds in isolating the subject is not what we are looking for in good underwater Bokeh. That is not considered Bokeh and is a completely different technique.