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06-16-2022, 04:21 AM - 14 Likes   #1
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Bokeh..just a load of balls?

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.

06-16-2022, 04:27 AM - 12 Likes   #2
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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.
understood and mostly agree....

but you could also just ignore them....no?
06-16-2022, 05:08 AM - 15 Likes   #3
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I too have have been taking photos since the 70's, so by the OP's reasoning my opinion is equally valid

Personally, I like bokeh. I see it as one of the things that differentiates photography from what we see with our own eyes; in other words, the difference between the purely documentary and the aspiration towards art.

Last edited by Sandy Hancock; 06-16-2022 at 09:49 PM. Reason: repetition repetition
06-16-2022, 05:26 AM - 4 Likes   #4
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I have a more moderate view of this. Sometimes it can be overdone, this is no different than “overcooked” over processed files that are too saturated and too sharpened. But there are times that the bokeh is quite attractive and enhances the shot.

06-16-2022, 05:38 AM - 5 Likes   #5
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I think it's a more healthy obsession than ever more detail and ever sharper lenses. Or eye AF or FPS or backside illuminated sensors, the list goes on, at least we're talking about the aesthetics of what makes a good photo and that isn't sharpness or detail.
06-16-2022, 05:51 AM - 6 Likes   #6
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I consider out-of-focus areas only to be a useful way of concentrating the view on the subject without distractions - mainly in portraiture and wildlife. Otherwise for landscape, townscape and architecture I want it all in focus.

It is true that the eye sees only only a small area in focus, in the centre of vision, and therefore some claim that having stuff round the photo's edge out-of-focus is more authentic. But that is not the end of the matter, because we move our direction of vision around when we take in a scene, and every part we look at directly is in focus in its turn. At least, that is what I do. I therefore find it frustrating if I look around a scene photo and some areas do not come into focus because the photographer left them out of focus. I particularly dislike intrusive out-of-focus foreground items such that old cliche - a fuzzy tree branch across the top of the photo. I often go to some lengths to avoid such things, and I just about tolerate out of focus foreground grass or paving.

Back in the 1990s I read many photo mags and books, but when I returned to photography in recent years I was puzzled by the frequent occurrence of the word "bokeh", and I had to look it up. In all my earlier reading had never come across the word or any discussion of the quality of out-of-focus areas, except for comments that mirror lenses gave rise to ringed highlights. Otherwise I still don't notice anything about the nature of out-of-focus-ness. But reading some lens reviews one would think that there was no other quality to consider.
06-16-2022, 05:53 AM   #7
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It can definitely be overdone, like any good thing. And when overdone it can be as annoying as, say, overdone HDR.

But perhaps you are letting something unimportant irritate you?

06-16-2022, 05:57 AM - 8 Likes   #8
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LOL!

I'm in Sandy Hancock's camp -- photographing since the 70's, learned about bokeh from the beginning (although the word came later), and see it as both a physical fact of photographic systems and a dimension for artistic control.

That said, anything in the realm of human endeavors goes through cycles of faddishness. The "cool kids" latch on to something, everyone tries to emulate it, most of them overdo it, ugliness ensues, and the fad dies an ignominious death.

For example, I remember when the first graphical operating systems appeared with bitmapped fonts in the early 80's. Quite a few people went crazy creating documents that looked like ransom notes. But that doesn't make fonts a bad thing, just another tool that needs thought and care. Just because some (or many) people misuse a capability does not make the capability bad.

So I'm not going to throw the bokeh baby out with the dirty Instagram water. The simple optical physical fact is that bokeh exist in a figurative 99.9% of photographs (the 0.1% are focus-stacked or flat-object images with no out-of-cus elements at all). Bokeh exist whether one likes them or not. The task of the photographer often entails adjusting the subject matter, composition, lighting, lens choice, and aperture to use the out-of-focus regions in a way that enhances the image.
06-16-2022, 06:10 AM - 4 Likes   #9
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Bokeh, the sarcastic approach.

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.
This rant reminds me of another one: Fake bokeh? What have we become?? - PentaxForums.com . By the way, both authors seem to dislike bokeh. The real one as well as the fake one.
I guess that bokeh gets stressed because modern lenses are so, well, sharp. In the old days we compared how sharp our subject in the picture was. Now we compare them on the basis of how unsharp fore- and background are. I am the station in life that I make fully bokeh pictures... Where others convert their camera to a monochrome by mutilating the camera I just switch off AF on camera and lens, set SR to off and have fully bokeh camera at the cost of nothing. Now I am ready to just push the exposure button. Only things I take into account is the right aperture and shutterspeed and then fire away. I never have enjoyed photographing as much as at the moment, none of my pictures taken failed. They are all of a lovely bokeh and it saves a lot of room on the SD card. I just shoot jpeg, not raw because as all my pictures are perfect I have no need of extensive post processing. Yes I love bokeh. My wife says I should stop this hobby, because I cannot make a good picture anymore. She claims she never heard about bokeh?
06-16-2022, 06:19 AM - 12 Likes   #10
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I think judicious use of shallow depth of field can help with portraiture. There are a lot of people who fall too in love with that and don't have enough depth of field for the subject. I think the bigger issue is when people sharpen an image with a lot of out of focus area it can do weird things to that background. If you are going to sharpen your image, it is probably best not to globally sharpen it, but rather to sharpen the in focus areas.

06-16-2022, 06:41 AM - 5 Likes   #11
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Well, it's cheaper than therapy, I guess.
06-16-2022, 06:44 AM - 4 Likes   #12
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I don't agree with OP.
06-16-2022, 06:48 AM - 2 Likes   #13
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I think we need to make a distinction between judicious use of depth of field in our photos and the term "bokeh" which really refers to the quality of the out of focus areas. I too started in photography in the 70's and had to look up "bokeh" when I returned to it as a hobby in the 2,000's. Depth of field has always been one element of a photographer's creative choice. But to be honest, the "quality" of the out of focus portions was never (in my memory) mentioned in lens reviews until more recently (i.e., last two decades). That said, I think bokeh is so subjective, I find it silly when a lens review rates a lens on bokeh and even compares it as having "better" or "worse" bokeh to other lenses. I find most lenses have a pleasing bokeh as long as the out-of-focus areas do not distract from the subject.
06-16-2022, 06:53 AM - 7 Likes   #14
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Everyone talks about the bokeh, but no one does anything about it.
06-16-2022, 06:59 AM - 2 Likes   #15
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QuoteOriginally posted by robgski Quote
Everyone talks about the bokeh, but no one does anything about it.
and I'm not talking about the linen, either...
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