Many of us seem to get obsessed with the sharpness of lenses and how much infinitesimally fine detail they can resolve. But for soft and dreamy images, bokeh is more important. This is a measure of the pictorial quality of defocused areas within an image. The trouble is, you can’t really measure it, as there’s no scientific test for good bokeh. It’s more a matter of subjective opinion, but there are, nevertheless, some conventional rules. As with most things in photography, however, the rules are only there to be broken.
For starters, if you’re after good bokeh, you’ll need a tight depth of field (DoF). When choosing a lens, it’s therefore only natural to pick something with a telephoto focal length and a wide aperture rating, both of which will…
