Originally posted by Thwyllo 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?