Is bokeh falling out of favor?

[p.giannakis]

Where does all the bokeh- hate come from? I don't quite get it.
In 1990, long before the general use of the internet, , Nikon introduced the 2.0/135 DC- Nikkor, a lens built to optimize - bokeh!

No hate from me. Anyway, I was converted to the bokeh-church for some time and went out of my way to get lenses with "good bokeh". I just don't believe any more to the importance assigned to it over the internet.

The DC lenses from Nikon were specialty lenses. Just like shift/tilt lenses they were designed to give professionals greater control over a specific parameter.

 

[RichC]

Bokeh is for lonely gearheads, nothing to shoot, bokeh helps.

Less and less are using cameras with lenses.
New Kardashians trend is digital P&S, no bokeh with those.
And not much from mobile phones.

Like many, you seem to think shallow depth of field (boke) and its aesthetics (bokeh) are the same - the latter being an invention of an American in the 1990s, Mike Johnston. They are two very different things.

It seems you don't like shallow DOF. You do realise you're dismissing massively important Japanese photographers like Moriyama, and other influential photographers like Klein?

Also, you're wrong about mobile phones. New mobile phones are introducing shallow DOF as a standard key camera feature (created by AI) - whether you want it or not!

As others have said, it's just a tool.

 

[valdas]

I will be a bit provocative and admit that I love nice bokeh and I do take photos where the background plays the significant part of my image (at leas in my eyes).

 

[Ko.Fe.]

Like many, you seem to think shallow depth of field (boke) and its aesthetics (bokeh) are the same - the latter being an invention of an American in the 1990s, Mike Johnston. They are two very different things.

It seems you don't like shallow DOF. You do realise you're dismissing massively important Japanese photographers like Moriyama, and other influential photographers like Klein?

Also, you're wrong about mobile phones. New mobile phones are introducing shallow DOF as a standard key camera feature (created by AI) - whether you want it or not!

As others have said, it's just a tool.

I just don't care about bokeh. I'm content shooter. Not an gearhead taking just one eye in focus and calling this as "portrait".

Last time I checked, Klein has nothing to do with bokeh. And I do have Daidō Moriyama book and studied it, watched documentaries just as with Klien.
Moriyama is using cheap digital P&S for long time now. Those don't make any bokeh.

As for phones, I don't have only automatic AI rendered bokeh on my Galaxy. It is not primitive (Apple) phone, I could engage it by selecting of Portrait mode.

 

[Dralowid]

I'm never quite sure what bokeh is but if it is what I think it is I see it as an effective tool to be used in movie making.

 

[Freakscene]

Like many, you seem to think shallow depth of field (boke) and its aesthetics (bokeh) are the same - the latter being an invention of an American in the 1990s, Mike Johnston. They are two very different things.

Have you read Mike Johnston’s articles on bokeh or the original Photo Techniques articles by John Kennerdell, @Oren Grad , and Harold Merklinger?



Nowhere does Mike, or the PT authors say that they like, encourage people to use shallow depth of field, or say that bokeh is about shallow depth of field. Or that its specific aesthetics are anything other than personal preference. In dozens of places on the old The Online Photographer site Mike says he does not like very shallow depth of field. He does say in numerous places “as a photographic term it (bokeh) simply refers to the blur of objects out of the depth of field. I've been told that photographic blur would most likely be referred to as 'bokeh-aji', which literally means 'taste of blur'."

He is continually misquoted: What Is Bokeh? "despite the fact that my name was referenced several times in the thread before I commented, no one paid the least bit of attention to anything I said" and "Some people like that kind of thing, some people don't. It's all good. If you want to learn it so you can attempt to apply it or control it, fine; if you don't, and prefer just to take pictures and let the chips (both the sharp and the blurry chips!) fall where they may, that's fine too."

And he says "Most often, these days, I just say "blur" rather than "bokeh"."

If this seems testy, sorry, but this sort of factual incorrectness pins my bogometer.

 

[Erik van Straten]

I like back- and foreground unsharpness in a photograph. Is that bokeh? Bokeh is a Japanese word, isn't it? It is a nice, short word, better than "unsharpness".

 

[Cascadilla]

Love those photos, but I somehow suspect that the backgrounds were not intentionally 'printed' lower contrast or lighter... I think that was just the ambient dust/haze/UV scatter influencing the B&W films of their day, which were much more blue-UV sensitive than later panchromatic B&W films. A good photographer took that into account and use it to best effect. This difference in the film spectral sensitivity from those days is where the notion that one should always have a UV filter on the camera came from... It was a practical response to the hazy effect caused by UV scatter. 🙂

That's my take on it, which I learned from when I was first making photos. Every 'old salt' in the photo industry would insist on fitting a UV filter whenever I bought a lens, but the somewhat more modern B&W panchromatic films of the middle-1960s and into the 1970s had reduced the UV hazy effect by quite a lot such that I almost never noticed any significant difference unless I happened to be shooting at high altitude.

You can see this hazy effect to some degree with modern orthochromatic films, but even in them the old UV sensitivity is much more controlled.

G

Not to be totally cynical about this, but I suspect that many camera sales people were just trying to pad the sale by selling UV filters along with the camera/lens. Many of these filters were heavily marked up and of poor quality and, ironically, bad enough to degrade the performance of a lens.

 

[splitimageview]

I suspect that many camera sales people were just trying to pad the sale by selling UV filters

Without regards to benefits or capabilities of UV filters, this is absolutely true. When I worked in a camera store back in the day, this was de rigueur, standard operating procedure, almost the first thing you were trained to do in sales...margins on filters were quite high, it was an easy way to make the store some extra bucks. We didn't sell crap filters tho. 😀

 

[panatomic]

The generational aspect is also relevant. Boomers, Gen X, and Millenials all went through the early digital era, when this trend started because big sensors and shallow depth-of-field were expensive. Suddenly people were taking photos with the lens wide open constantly, even if it looked worse or harsher than it would have if they had stopped the lens down. Faster and ultrafast lenses became normalized, and gone were the days usually having two or three primes of the same focal length but different speeds. Now it’s all about spending the most money on ultrafast lenses and always using it at full aperture (only slight exaggeration).

My one hope is that Gen Z and Alpha may see the trend as unfashionable, so that I can finally have a wide selection of compact, medium speed primes again, and that people finally return to depth-of-field control and put a little more intentionality into it.

 

[splitimageview]

I think indeed it has already become passé.

Bokeh for its sake can't grab me emotionally. A well-executed photograph on the other hand...

 

[38Deardorff]

I like back- and foreground unsharpness in a photograph. Is that bokeh? Bokeh is a Japanese word, isn't it? It is a nice, short word, better than "unsharpness".

Erik, blur is a nice short word too. Appropriating a foreign word doesn't give the concept any additional weight.

 

[rulnacco]

"Bokeh is a bourgeois concept. And entirely irrelevant and, frankly, a bit silly."

-- Henri Cartier-Bresson

 

[valdas]

"Bokeh is a bourgeois concept. And entirely irrelevant and, frankly, a bit silly."

-- Henri Cartier-Bresson

# je suis bourgeoisie

 

[brusby]

What seems silly to me is taking sides for or against bokeh. It's another tool which can be used to good effect to aid in the making of an image, or often misused when relied on too heavily to the detriment of other more important image elements.

 

[Disappointed_Horse]

I seldom shoot wider open than f/2.8 as I mostly shoot manual focus lenses and find it difficult to get shots any more wide open than that in perfect focus. Frankly at f/2.8 on a 50mm lens, I find the backgrounds blurred out just the right amount anyway.

To be perfectly honest, I struggle a bit to see the differences in bokeh between most lenses, unless we're talking lenses with really swirly bokeh like a Biotar or Helios or something like that.

I find the emphasis placed on bokeh by many current lens reviewers quite ridiculous. Most YouTubers start talking about bokeh ten seconds into a review as if it's most important quality of a lens, which is absurd. The part of the image that's in focus should be the most important part. If you don't understand that, I don't think any lens is going to help you.

I think the inclusion of the "portrait mode" fake bokeh in the iPhone camera app was the beginning of the end for bokeh as an artistic element (if that's what it ever was). This feature wasn't that great when it came out, and although it has improved considerably, it still often looks very fake and has become a cliché.

 

[Slumgullion]

The only thing that really matters in this is that whoever transliterated ボケ味 (boke aji) into English did so in the weirdest way possible. So now we have all sorts of people pronouncing it quite strangely. For example, I'm not sure what part of the UK YouTuber Christopher Frost is from. To my American ears his accent and voice have a very dulcet tone, but how he says bo'k-ehh with an almost glottal stop is weird. And it's not his accent. Other English speakers from all over do this too.

ボケ (boke) rhymes with "ok" with even emphasis on both syllables.

 

[38Deardorff]

# je suis bourgeoisie

Non.... vous etes bourgeois.....
bourgeoisie is a class.....

 

[valdas]

Non.... vous etes bourgeois.....
bourgeoisie is a class.....

Mais si, c’est vraiment ça, je suis bourgeoisie, as the group, because on the individual level (bourgeois) it can have a bit different meaning (not always thought). And I know this is not grammatically correct. But that was intentional.

 

[Oren Grad]

ボケ (boke) rhymes with "ok" with even emphasis on both syllables.

The katakana "ケ" is pronounced as a short "e" sound (e.g. as in "help"), not a long "ay" sound.