
Cut those circles out through the inner side of the drawn line.

It happens when very wide apertures are used. And to make it more confusing, the above image has taken with the same NIKKOR 50mm f/1.8G lens. Here you can clearly see that the spots are almost perfect circles. The next question now is, how can the highlight bokeh be in circle shape some times. Just like that the highlight bokeh can be pentagonal, octagonal, nonagonal or any other shape (in non-iris diaphragms) according to the aperture’s shape.

Seven Blade Iris Diaphragm of NIKKOR 50mm f/1.8G It is because that lens has a seven-blade iris diaphragm. You can see that the highlight spots are heptagonal here. This one is taken with my NIKKOR 50mm f/1.8G. It is just because the blades of the diaphragm are curved. If you pay enough attention you will note that the sides of the hexagon are not straight. That is why the shape of the aperture has become a hexagon. So the camera which has taken the above image has a six-blade ‘iris diaphragm’. This is discussed in the article ‘ What is Aperture? – Understanding the Basics‘ also. Highlight bokeh gets the exact shape of the aperture. The next question that arises is, how the highlight bokeh get their shape? You may have noticed that it is not always hexagonal like in the above image. It is clearly visible that the highlight spots in the bokeh have created hexagonal shapes, while other areas are just blurred.

Unlike other areas in bokeh, a light source or a strong reflection acts differently. Now let us look back at why I used the word ‘highlight bokeh’. In photography, bokeh is the aesthetic quality of the blur produced in out-of-focus parts of an image. Just as the word suggests, we use that word to refer to the effect of things being out-of-focus aka blurry (background and/or foreground) in photography. It comes from the Japanese word ‘boke’ which means ‘blur’ or ‘haze’. Hope you all know the meaning of the word ‘bokeh’. I just felt like using it (I’ll explain why), so here we go. First of all, I should mention to you that the word ‘highlight bokeh’ is not a standard term.
