Bokeh: Do you like it or loathe it?

[alistair.o]

Ah .. those were the days eh? ... back when poor photos had an impact, when Are and Bure were still part of the agenda and that stuff was new, fresh and original

I would have been eighteen or nineteen when I first saw the Japanese stuff Provoke, there was another similar mag out at the time I recall ... at college we passed them around between ourselves like old copy of Playboy and all had a go at emulating the style at some point (you could get drunk and still be able to take photos accounts for some of the attraction I expect) ... It made it into Zoom a couple of years later as it became more mainstream, it may even have made it to AP by now ...

... but that was what? forty odd years ago? yet folk persist in thinking it's cool and contemporary ... its as modern as my dad, in flares, dancing to Abba ... and about as relevant artistically these days

So no; a slavish attachment to the blurry bits of a photo is simplistic, and formulaic ... the world has enough photos of railings or a bit of cherry blossom with a blurry background now, its gone beyond boring now to become meaningless in most cases

I agree (I danced in flares!)

I have a suspicion that most 'new' photographers haven't a clue about DOF. I'm guessing it's the 'digital does it all for me' age that is responsible.

 

[Roger Hicks]

I love articulated explanations, they allow to learn from one's mistake... 😀

Ok, if we have top believe Wikipedia: "The English spelling bokeh was popularized in 1997 in Photo Techniques magazine, when Mike Johnston, the editor at the time, commissioned three papers on the topic for the March/April 1997 issue." (so, yeah, maybe I am indeed wrong), in the same article it is mentioned that "Leica lenses, especially vintage ones, are often claimed to excel in bokeh quality because they used to have 11, 12, or 15 blades" (so maybe I am not totally wrong as I see most of the time this term associated with Leitz). Anyway, who cares, the original question was wrong too as it asked about bokashi but used the term bokeh and the evaluation of "beautiful rendering of a certain image" is subjective anyway.

By the way, looking up the term I found the related "Bokode". I actually ended up learning something, it interesting reading for all nerd types guys who are not in the field (like me) and have never eard of it.

GLF

Sorry, but not just maybe. You made an assertion with no basis whatsoever, and that no-one else would believe if they had looked up even the most basic information on the subject -- as you just did. What could I have said to counter that?

Cheers,

R.

 

[Spanik]

Well, unless you really plan for it bokeh will always be there in more or less amounts.

I only loathe it when it becomes the only purpose or discussion point of a photo.

 

[Roger Hicks]

Well, unless you really plan for it bokeh will always be there in more or less amounts.

I only loathe it when it becomes the only purpose or discussion point of a photo.

Well said!

Cheers,

R.

 

[kuuan]

intravenous bokeh therapy


Untitled by Andreas, on Flickr, S-M-C Takumar 1.4/50, Pentax K-x

 

[giellaleafapmu]

Sorry, but not just maybe. You made an assertion with no basis whatsoever, and that no-one else would believe if they had looked up even the most basic information on the subject -- as you just did. What could I have said to counter that?

Cheers,

R.

Well, not to start an argument here but there is a base to what I said, namely that I hear the world bokeh 99% of the times from people who love particularly that certain brand so I made a joke about it (there should be a green face like this in my original mesage 😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀:bang🙂. The joke was part of an answer which cannot be wrong because it told what I think about bokeh. If one day it will come to me someone saying that my pictures are good except that they don't buy them because they cannot see the "Summilx Signature" in the out of focus areas I'll start bothering, so far it neve happened to me so I have only a few lenses which I avoid on that basis and that's it...

GLF

 

[noisycheese]

So we have managed to make a row even over the bokeh?

Well of course - the main reason for the existence of interweb forums is to provide crabby people a place to start fights with others without running the risk of having their front teeth knocked out. 😀

 

[paulfish4570]

why did this merit a thread?
and so many answers?
🙂

 

[uhoh7]

Conrad's comments alone were worth the price of admission 😉

Smudge prefers to be the absolute center of attention:

DSC00287 by unoh7, on Flickr

For her, the OOF fairy world must point back to glistening white fir. For this effect, she demanded I send to Japan for a Sonnetar, seen here at F/1.1

 

[oltimer]

90% of my photography is the wild, and no farm or caged crap. This is were I really love the use of bokeh and the big lenses.

 

[gilgsn]

Bokeh? I couldn't care less. To me bokeh means "out of focus." I don't ascribe negative or positive qualities to it. It's out of focus, period.

Sometimes pushing the art angle too far is just silly. I've never heard anyone comment on what a great photo it is because of bokeh; it's mostly about composition and the emotion the subject generates.

Gil.

 

[uhoh7]

Bokeh? I couldn't care less. To me bokeh means "out of focus." I don't ascribe negative or positive qualities to it. It's out of focus, period.

Since there is a great variation of OOF rendering both between lenses and also with the same lens, between backgrounds, distances and stops, and all these are presented to the viewer as part of the image, "out of focus, period", is just ignoring reality.

However, it's not like we don't often choose to ignore reality, for equally varied reasons 🙂

 

[shiro_kuro]

I like it .... it shows me my wife is learning different ways to photograph and use the fuji x100s I gave her ... She also does not know she is not supposed be able to shoot kids with such a camera .... It's cool when people start to see all the possibilities photography brings on their own ..... also she did not know it is called Bokeh ......She being Japanese , that word implies a fuzzy and forgetful mind or day dreaming ..... anyway it is a one of the first exciting effects of photography discovered by new photographers and learning to replicate it gets one to think about the possibilities ...... to loathe Bokeh ,one may as well loathe the shutter release or a lens cap

 

[Spanik]

Oh, I do loathe lens caps on a rangefinder.

 

[Tonkatsu-Dog]

...to loathe Bokeh ,one may as well loathe the shutter release or a lens cap

Words of wisdom mr White and Black!

 

[noisycheese]

...to loathe Bokeh ,one may as well loathe the shutter release or a lens cap...

+1.

Last I checked, bokeh has never robbed, raped or murdered anyone. 😛

 

[Alberti]

The act of loathing = disliking, maybe up to disgust - in some cases - of the overdone rings and wirey (?) in the pictures. I see that all to quick in pictures taken with the F1.2 lenses (such as the Canon); also many 1.5's Sonnars.

In my opinion it is hard to frame right with a RF to avoid those nasty backgrounds (such as foliage with the sun or the clouded sky behind). SLR users have just that tad advantage.

So it comes down to experience maybe.
Maybe some wham their lens wide open as quick as possible. I just quickly pass by those images.
I think the original poster who started off the sighted 'loath' comment makes beautiful pictures of another universe, remembrance for me of big 4"x5" camera's. From that (the F64 gang so to say) it is even normal to expect such a sigh. So who cares?
Interpreting anyway. 🙄

 

[rbsinto]

Bokeh? I couldn't care less. To me bokeh means "out of focus." I don't ascribe negative or positive qualities to it. It's out of focus, period.

Sometimes pushing the art angle too far is just silly. I've never heard anyone comment on what a great photo it is because of bokeh; it's mostly about composition and the emotion the subject generates.

Gil.

Of course.
But you've not heard or read those comments because you've not been looking in the right places!
Check out "If bokeh was a flavor............." a thread in the "Lens Lust" forum at Nikoncafe (www.nikoncafe.com) where "Sparky" the author of the thread goes on about it as if it was the star attraction of the picture, and when I disagreed and said essentially what you've said, I was attacked.
Finally, because I fear that stupidity is sometimes contagious, I walked away from him and his adoring bokeh fans.

 

[JHutchins]

A) Lens caps on a rangefinder are bad juju.
B) Threads like this get large because you can participate in them without any actual knowledge.
C) A lot of this camera game is figuring out ways to simplify what's in front of you so other people can see what you saw. Blur's a way to simplify, exposure is a way to simplify, so's color, so's removal of color, so's image geometry, so's narrative. And "simplify" here doesn't mean make simple -- good pictures are often complex -- it means remove non-contributing complications.
D) As a word for talking about lenses, bokeh is much more useful than one would think given its comparatively recent introduction into the photographic lexicon. There really are lenses that look nice and lenses that look not at all nice away from the plane of sharp focus. Sometimes it's tricky because lenses that look nice behind the plane of sharp focus can look not nice in front of it and vice versa.
E) Sometimes what I like about a picture is not so much the way the blurred part looks or the way the sharp part looks, but the way it moves from sharp to blurred -- the continual desharpening along the way. That's really what I like about this for example:


Blaze Bell by John, on Flickr

(Zeiss Jena 50/1.5 Sonnar)