Super Test: Lenses for Bokeh

Forget total sharpness. Join us as we pick out the market-leading lenses for capturing beautiful bokeh background blur!

Forget about the total sharpness! Blur wonderfully using these bokeh lens beauties

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 still some conventional rules. As with most things in photography, however, rules are only there to be broken.

For starters, if you’re after good bokeh, you’ll need a tight depth of field. 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 help give you a tight depth of field, so you can isolate the main subject by blurring the surroundings. Fast 85mm primes are a particular favourite for use with full-frame cameras, whereas ‘nifty fifty’ lenses are similarly popular for Canon’s APS-C bodies.

Even so, shorter focal lengths can also be useful, enabling you to get closer to subjects and gain a tight depth of field by using a short focus distance, while also squeezing a greater area of blurry background into the frame, thanks to the wider viewing angle and change in perspective. Here are some top choices to suit a wide range of cameras, and wallets.