Bokeh is the blurry section of your photographs. Pictures with one thing in focus and everything else out of focus can be really beautiful and engaging images. But when you have bad bokeh in a photo, the background becomes distracting and takes the viewer's eyes away from your crisp subject and as a result your pictures just don't pop out the way they should.

So how do you get good bokeh in your pictures? It all depends on how the light gets to your film/sensor.

The number and shape of the blades in your lens effect bokeh. If you had 4 blades in you lens to adjust your aperture, a blurry light in the background of a picture you took would look like a square, not a circle. If you have a 8 or so blades in your lens, that little blurry light starts looking like a circle.

The quality of your glass in your lens also effects your bokeh. Bokeh can really take away from your image when a little blurry light in the background of your image is a little donut instead of a dot or a sphere. If you don't put some effort into making the optics of a lens, your lens will most likely end up creating distracting blurry areas due to bad bokeh.

So how do you find a camera or a lens that has good bokeh? Well unfortunately for those of us in the western world, we're more focused on what's in focus rather than what's out of focus. As a result we don't see reviews that talk about the quality of bokeh very often. Fortunately, high end camera guys care about it, so at least there's some push to make lenses that don't suck in this department. I guess my tip would be to look at bokeh when testing cameras/lens out. Does this camera's blurry look like good blurry to you?

I'm sorry I don't have a better suggestion than that. Does anyone know of any good online places where they compare the bokeh of different lenses?