A shallow depth of field created with a lens like the Canon 50mmf/1.4
or Canon 100mmf/2.8 gives me many creative ways of composing a
photograph. The background or so called 'negative space' is as important
to me as the sharply focused principal subject. The images obtain a
special 'painterly look' or 'bokeh' and printed on canvas they sometimes
appear to be painted and not photographed.
I apply this technique to almost all my close up and macro photography.
Nevertheless there are photographs which have this painterly feel in a
special way.
The term 'bokeh' originally comes from the japanese word boke
(暈け or ボケ), which means “blur” or “haze”, or boke-aji (ボケ味),
the “blur quality”. In photography bokeh is the blur, or the aesthetic
quality of the blur, in out-of-focus areas of an image, or “the way the
lens renders out-of-focus points of light.” Differences in lens aberrations
and aperture shape cause some lens designs to blur the images in
different ways.*
* Sorce (on bokeh) Wikipedia