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06-22-2022, 05:02 AM - 2 Likes   #106
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QuoteOriginally posted by RussV Quote
Only photographers consciously notice bokeh, everyone else looks at the main subject matter.
But are unconsciously influenced by the bokeh - perhaps harmony, tension etc or merely encourages the viewer to not look beyond the subject.

06-22-2022, 06:22 AM   #107
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bokeh from outer space?

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/9908/eclipsetree_ejisrael_c.jpg
06-22-2022, 06:26 AM - 1 Like   #108
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QuoteOriginally posted by GUB Quote
But are unconsciously influenced by the bokeh - perhaps harmony, tension etc or merely encourages the viewer to not look beyond the subject.
Indeed... just enough blur that the setting is communicated, but with few if any details to distract from the subject - and a three-dimensional feel to the image, due to subject / background and/or foreground separation. It's just a tool, like so many other techniques we use and creative decisions we take.

Here's a great example by Vivian Maier, taken in 1954... The background is recognisable enough to communicate the urban setting - we see the buildings and the taxi cab, but there's no detail to distract us. All our attention is drawn to the subject, the expression on her face and the fox stole over her shoulder...

Last edited by BigMackCam; 06-22-2022 at 06:34 AM.
06-23-2022, 09:54 AM   #109
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QuoteOriginally posted by Thwyllo Quote
Indubitably, unequivocally yes as far as I'm concerned and I'll happily explain why.

I've been taking photos for 50+ years and this (to me) incredibly annoying phenomenon has only been a thing for the last few years, especially since the new generation of Instagram/Lomography fans decided that buying cheap nasty plastic cameras, or spending 50 of whatever your local currency is on a prime lens for a £$€1000+ camera body were good ideas.

Now I wouldn't especially argue with the second one since it helps with the budget and gives new life to old otherwise redundant kit, but please e don't think you need an excuse to do it.

So that's the annoyance factor, exacerbated by an onslaught of social media postings on the subject.

The second factor is also about annoyance... According to traditional photographic wisdom, background - especially out of focus - features in one of two ways; either not at all (as in fill the frame with your subject), or as a contrast to an isolated subject sitting, for example, on a rule of thirds intersection, in which case the background should not be distracting.

It's my experience that people all too frequently go out of their way to feature a background that's (1) overwhelmingly disproportionately large, and (2) full of these dreadful, annoying and distracting 'bokeh balls' cos they're a thing innit.

Seriously people, unless your specialism is night-time urban photography, or recording winsome waifs in dappled woodland settings then please give it a rest. I for one couldn't care less about your balls. Indeed I would say that anyone trumpeting "look at the bokeh in my photo!" is as likely as not to be taking substandard photos with poorly considered composition. An out of focus background (to give it it's proper English description) has it's time, place and function but these days it's vastly overused and misunderstood in my opinion.

Rant over.
Really enjoyed the rant. I'm an old 1960s vintage photographer and have gone through my share of photo fads. So I hear the the exasperation! As far as justifying the "need" to put subpar lenses on expensive cameras, well, everybody does like to justify. Human nature I guess. Personally if the final output is good, I dont really care how you justify making it. Good is good PERIOD. Not so good is another story. But in any case it is the FINAL WORK that speaks loudest and with ALL the justification it needs. As far as "bokeh" goes, I have to agree that its value to a photo is a bit overblown. Gotta go back to the final output argument again. If the photo works, the "bokeh" either works or is irrelevant. I do think some lenses are almost magical in the way they separate the in-focus regions from the out-of-focus. Leica glass has been legendary for this (whether deserved or not). I have some old Japanese glass that is simply wonderful. But for good or bad, it is still up to me to make the final output work.

06-23-2022, 02:57 PM - 1 Like   #110
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I'm not reading an 8 page thread but I'll drop my opinion here. My issue with bokeh isn't bokeh itself, I think it's a tool and it's good at creating subject isolation, depth, and a certain feeling to the photo. However I do think there's a trend that it basically becomes the only way for some people to create this effect. Realistically I think it is becoming a crutch for photographers and people should branch out and try to find some interesting backgrounds and use good lighting technique rather than just blur it all away.

There's a lot of ways to do photography you know.
06-23-2022, 03:05 PM - 3 Likes   #111
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QuoteOriginally posted by ZombieArmy Quote
I'm not reading an 8 page thread but I'll drop my opinion here. My issue with bokeh isn't bokeh itself, I think it's a tool and it's good at creating subject isolation, depth, and a certain feeling to the photo. However I do think there's a trend that it basically becomes the only way for some people to create this effect. Realistically I think it is becoming a crutch for photographers and people should branch out and try to find some interesting backgrounds and use good lighting technique rather than just blur it all away.

There's a lot of ways to do photography you know.
Without seeing each photographer's entire portfolio, how do you judge who's using it as a crutch and who's using it in an informed and balanced way? And how do you do so without overlaying your own subjective views and creative preferences?
06-23-2022, 03:51 PM - 4 Likes   #112
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QuoteOriginally posted by BigMackCam Quote
Without seeing each photographer's entire portfolio, how do you judge who's using it as a crutch and who's using it in an informed and balanced way? And how do you do so without overlaying your own subjective views and creative preferences?
Many would be surprised as to how much thought goes into the background in the OOF areas to aid in the total appearance and the composition of the final image. In wildlife photography simply shifting to the left or right a few cm can change how that image will appear. For me selecting the OOF area can and is all most as important as the subject you are photographing

06-23-2022, 04:38 PM - 1 Like   #113
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QuoteOriginally posted by ZombieArmy Quote
I'm not reading an 8 page thread but I'll drop my opinion here. My issue with bokeh isn't bokeh itself, I think it's a tool and it's good at creating subject isolation, depth, and a certain feeling to the photo. However I do think there's a trend that it basically becomes the only way for some people to create this effect. Realistically I think it is becoming a crutch for photographers and people should branch out and try to find some interesting backgrounds and use good lighting technique rather than just blur it all away.

There's a lot of ways to do photography you know.
I think that the perception of a "trend" is a little misleading.
What we are seeing is a "trend" of using old glass. People never thought about this in the film days and early digital.
But the thing about old primes is the only way to differentiate their performance from modern zooms is to utililise them wide open or near to it where kit zooms can't follow.
A legacy lens at f8 is going to look no different from modern glass.
So it is inevitable that wide open characteristics is going to be the subject of discussion with old glass.
Hence the bokeh characteristics.
06-24-2022, 12:42 AM   #114
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QuoteOriginally posted by BigMackCam Quote
Without seeing each photographer's entire portfolio, how do you judge who's using it as a crutch and who's using it in an informed and balanced way? And how do you do so without overlaying your own subjective views and creative preferences?
I speak more for beginner photographers than professionals.
06-25-2022, 01:00 AM - 2 Likes   #115
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My goodness: is this still running? The wonky old-man rant was a fun, tongue-in-cheek thread-seeder, but for heaven's sake let's be real.

Bokeh was 'invented' the moment we focused the first lens: when projecting onto a flat medium, everything is bokeh apart from the focal plane. The goal of a lens is to bring the order of focus to the chaos of blur, so naturally it was what photographers initially 'focused on'. Few optical formulations and diaphragm types were in use, and early lenses had a drawing style dominated by aberrations and poor correction, so defocused areas looked broadly similar – when it was even possible to distinguish them from the (centrally placed) subject in focus.

But from the 1950s, diverse, cheap, well-corrected taking lenses existed; many millions of photographs were taken. It became obvious that they rendered differently. People noticed. People named the new things they noticed. One of them was bokeh.

It's inevitable. It's not new, and it's not going away.

Just out of curiosity - what is being proposed here? That we somehow 'abolish' bokeh – suggestions, please? That we put our heads in the sand and stop noticing the pictures we're taking? That we move to AI-controlled focus-stacking cameraphones rendering everything sharp from 3mm to infinity ? It's just nonsense. Please stop. Rant over.

The question of how defocused a background (or foreground) should be is a fruitful one that could/should be taught. Like any artistic decision, there are principles to be sensitively and creatively deployed, not rigid rules to learn by rote. In my view, there has been an over-correction (especially on YouTube) resulting in backgrounds that are too defocused, but that's simply amateurs thinking "if blur is good for subject isolation; more blur is better". Typical rookie error.

Last edited by 169; 06-25-2022 at 01:11 AM.
06-25-2022, 08:20 AM   #116
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Ah there! Bokeh is cool and malleable (flexible, customizable). Just use it in moderation and as needed.
Purists and reluctant ones, I apologize for my shy joke.
(In this extended conversation).

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06-27-2022, 11:46 AM   #117
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QuoteOriginally posted by Rondec Quote
I'm not sure about all of this. I think that fast lenses existed prior to 2001. Lots of people owned a 50mm f1.4 or f1.7. The whole point was to allow faster shutter speeds in situations where you didn't want to use higher iso film (or you had maxed it out). The fact that the background was blurry was a side effect of that fast aperture speed.

Whether people called it bokeh then or background blur or something else, it existed and smart photographers used it selectively in their images. The same thing is true today. Portraits, in particular, can have everything in focus, or can have the background blurred. Depending on the background, it may be beneficial to blur it out -- some backgrounds do nothing to help with a portrait and in fact distract from it (blurring can too).
Canon produced an f0.95 lens in around 1963...there's an article about it in the '35mm and sub-miniature' magazine of the time. It was mounted on a Canon Rangefinder camera and was very wide. A photograph was taken of a black cat in a coal cellar, with a single candle providing the light source. I've never seen or heard of it since. Briefly back to Bokeh via a Charles lamb essay about life in ancient China. A farm with pigs on it burned down in a fire. The owner burnt his hand, while searching through the ashes, instinctively licked his hand and liked the taste...he had invented roast pork! There followed a spate of farm fires, until the farmers realised that they could get roast pork without the need for all the arson. I studied photography in college in the late 1960s, which included lens theory (and of course practical application) and the phenomenon of the 'circles of confusion'. Perhaps there are circles of confusion which can be 'unconfused' if a little more lens theory is understood, rather than acquiring an obsessive need to pay a lot of money for ancient lenses and provide a lucrative income for very willing suppliers!
06-27-2022, 08:16 PM - 3 Likes   #118
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Seeing "Bokeh"

I have heard it said, the history of art is the history of man's learning to "see" the physical world around us. In latter centuries this grew into making images that not only reflect the real world we've learned to see, but also to represent images that literally form in our "mind's eye." And throughout all this time we have given names to the elements and qualities that makeup what we see in an image. Back in the renaissance, the masters struggled to define the laws of physical geometry as they relate to sight. Before them, folks were only vaguely aware of geometric perspective, and their representations of the world looked primitive and flat. From them we got tricks, procedures, descriptions, and even mathematics for describing and constructing the 3-dimensional images that now so fascinate and drive our sense of art. Key to all this are the visual ideas that are made accessible through language and math. For such, we need a vocabulary that allows us to communicate, think about, and explore ideas and images. "Bokeh" is just one such "word and idea pair," that we now use to have discussions like the ones in this thread. Without the word, the idea is just a vague notion that some are dimly aware of and others are not at all. The word makes the notion accessible and we now can speak about it to any sighted person in real and understandable ways. OK! So now we are talking. Some like this, some don't. But the interesting thing is that the phenomenon of "bokeh" has always been with us. It is the inevitable consequence of light passing through lenses. And our eyes are made of lenses. Hence we have been subjected to it for as long as we have been using our eyes. What has been missing until recently is a word for it. Now we can notice it. Experience it. Revel in it. Or hate it. I for one have enjoyed the whole range of reactions people have had in this discussion. All possible because we now have a word for it. And much to the chagrin of some, it not a fad, it is real. And different lenses emphasize it in different ways and to different degrees. It is up to the photographer to exploit or to minimize this fact to make great art.

Last edited by jmcsys; 06-28-2022 at 08:03 AM. Reason: improve clarity
06-27-2022, 09:37 PM - 7 Likes   #119
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Busy background, but I trusted my Adaptall-2 180/2.5 to generate (mostly) smooth bokeh at f/4...





When I saw this damselfly land, I immediately looked beyond it and could easily envision the final image when I saw the brilliant yellow trefoil - in fact, had the trefoil not been there, I probably would not have attempted the photo...


Last edited by luftfluss; 06-27-2022 at 09:43 PM.
06-27-2022, 09:43 PM   #120
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QuoteOriginally posted by luftfluss Quote
Busy background, but I trusted my Adaptall-2 180/2.5 to generate (mostly) smooth bokeh at f/4...





When I saw this damselfly land, I immediately looked beyond it and could easily envision the final image when I saw the brilliant yellow trefoil - in fact, had the trefoil not been there, I probably would not have attempted the photo...
Lovely pics!
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