Sickly out of focus backgrounds

Doesn't this depend on what you're shooting? Portraiture lends itself to shallow DOF and landscapes/street lend themselves to more DOF, as general rules. You can always break the rules, but there should be a reason. At least, that's what I was always taught in my classes.
 
Roger Hicks said:
Selective focus is one thing: turning a jumbled background into a blur. But more and more, I'm noticing pictures where the o-o-f background is so noticeable that it's nauseating. It's not a jumble turned into a blur: it's clear objects (buildings, etc) rendered in very poor focus.

This isn't a 'bokeh' issue. It's just that on a bright, sunny day, I'm used to seeing most of a scene more or less in focus. Shooting at 1/4000 wide open, solely because you can, just looks weird to me. Shallow focus seems natural in poor light, but in bright daylight, it looks contrived and artificial, at least to me.

Is this pure habituation/age (when I started in the 60s, there were still plenty of cameras that stopped at 1/500 second)? Or is it that I'm seeing a fashion that will, with any luck, be short lived?

Cheers,

R.
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Hi Roger,

I'd really like to see some samples to understand the "blur level" you are writing about. I start to sense that you are objecting to a "middle ground" here - not totally blurred but not share either.

A "slightly out of focus" background can be used to emphasis the subject while still showing the setting. The blur also adds depth to the image, the more the blur the further away the object is from the main subject.

I tend to experience that required blur levels for something to work depend on reproduction size of the image - for web viewing one tends to need more blur than, say for a 8x10 print.

Joachim
 
I too have observed what I think Roger is describing. Typically used for portraits with a background that is so OOF that it looks like the subject is standing in front of a rear projection screen thus creating an image that looks fake -- even though it may not be.

I hope Pickett is correct and that this is just another phase, rather like all those folks who made wide-angle portraits while standing on a ladder and looking down on their subjects.
 
At the risk of setting myself up for ridicule, I'll put up an example here that may be the sort of thing you are talking about. The background here is obviously not blurred to oblivion. And definitely not in focus.
This was very intentional on my part - feeling that the background maintained enough focus to make it clear what the object in the distance is.
This was part of a small documentary project I did on the refurbishment of an old WWII-era bomber. And this is Mitchell, the hangar dog.

It was a muddy, rainy, overcast day. But I suspect there was room to get more in focus if I wanted to. If anything, I wish I'd gotten a lower perspective to cut some of the dead space between the dog and the plane, but I like the focus just the way it is.


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GSNfan said:
Throwing the background out of focus is a dirty and cheap way of taking 'creative looking' shots without being creative.
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Why do people have to generalise about techniques that are a matter of personal choice for the person actually taking the photo. Talk about stamping your own opinion on a subject ...
 
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