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    There is a group of lucky beggars among photographers. They are going ape over bokeh. This word means features of objects blurring which are located in blur zone of the camera lens. Two types of bokeh are distinguished: foreground bokeh and background bokeh. Bokeh is peculiar to every camera lens. A human eye, for example, is a single-lens objective. At this it is highly imperfect. However, we always focus it on some particular object. Our brain ignores blur zones. Camera lenses are utterly impartial. They blur everything what is not focused. But they blur in different ways. Some of them do this beautifully, others don’t. Lenses of cheep cameras lack ability to blur something to make background neutral. They depict acute zone of the shot roughly, at the same time in the interior of the shot you can make out lampposts, trees, wires which you would like to get rid of. In this case, as in most others, you can rely on common regularity: expensive optics has beautiful blurring, and cheep optics – bad blurring. I can also add that optics of medium format cameras has more purebred bokeh than optics of narrow-film cameras. Utterly specific blurring of foreground and background bokeh is peculiar to catadioptric lenses invented in Soviet Union epoch by D.D. Maksutov. Image is produced there by the mirrors, and lenses are used for aberration reduction. Thanks to their design, all mirror lenses are remarkable for light weight and small size. But they depict rings instead of points. This fact reduces their acutance ability but on the other hand they have such an unusual bokeh that many photographers use them to get peculiar white rings on the background and spectacular “feathers” on the foreground. (See photo).

 
    The last one. It is an example of blurring peculiar to narrow-film telephotolenses. Camera Model Name - Fuji S2 pro. Sensitivity 100 ACA. Camera lens Nikkor 70-200/2,8. Exposure 1/640 sec. Aperture value – 2,8.

  
    After a storm. This is an example of blurring peculiar to normal lenses of medium format cameras. Camera Model Name - Rolley SL-66. Camera lens Planar 80/2/8. Film - Fujichrome Astia 100 ACA. Exposure 1/15 sec. Aperture 8.