Bokeh is dead - Long live SOFA!

[Hugh T]

One more post for those interested. I found a very good, concise article on Bokeh giving the origin of the word and some good examples here:
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/columns/sm-04-04-04.shtml

 

[canonetc]

I prefer Bokeh to SOFA. "SOFA" sounds cheesy and trailer-park. Implies an image of someone laying on his/her sofa or couch and shooting. At least Bokeh has some flair. What is Bokeh, by the way....? 🙂

Chris
canonetc

 

[RubenBlaedel]

I prefer Bokeh to SOFA. "SOFA" sounds cheesy and trailer-park. Implies an image of someone laying on his/her sofa or couch and shooting. At least Bokeh has some flair. What is Bokeh, by the way....? 🙂

Chris
canonetc

Bokeh = Diziness/fuziness . very sofisticated ! Trialerpark my A... 🙂

 

[2maneekameras]

The out of focus areas of my goerz, leica, schneider, zeiss, et al glass looks much more like DAVENPORT than sofa or bokeh to me. darned awful very elegant nearly perfect outoffocus regions transmitted

 

[kiev4a]

I despise both words. How about "the out-of-focus background is pleasant?"

 

[popitz]

bokeh it is for me because that's how i knew it from the start and also because i live in japan 😀

 

[Bertram2]

What I find remarkable is that almost 22% of the voters don't give a damn for OOF details ! 🙂)
I would not be so radical , a SLR zoom wide open can look terrible but I tend a bit to socke's opinion. My personal perception over the years is that the issue is discussed again and again mostly by that kind of camera owners ( not photogs) who spent their time to buy lenses and try to verify later with "test shots" what some gurus had said before about the lenses.

In other words for me bokeh is a relevant quality issue for shooting wide open,
but it is not as important or even decisive as the all-talk-no-photo-lens-tester-amateur-party tries to make it.

Watching these "testphotos" I sometimes think "man why don't you simply try to take a really nice good pleasing photo with this wonderful expensive lens instead of proving publicly your technical incompetence with poorely executed and poorely scanned test shots ??"

This isn'nt meant rude and I hope all those who ever have posted bokeh tests on RFF will not take it as a personal offense, I feel just so very tired of all this bokeh stuff and must get rid of my feelings from time to time. ;-)

Regards,
Bertram

 

[laptoprob]

Have you ever seen this site? Explains it very graphically!
http://www.flarg.com/bokeh.html
Rob.

 

[dostacos]

SOFA is losing in the poll! Can I vote again? Here in America, our motto is: "Vote early, vote often."

Huck it is time for the "CHICAGO VOTE"!

ah...execpt I am going to get the Chicago vote for Bokeh :dance:


For those of you from other countries, Chicago is known for getting out the vote INCLUDING but not limited to people that are dead...LOOOOONG dead, voting the graveyard gotta love it 😀

 

[Gabriel M.A.]

A little taste of bokeh, and what a fast lens' full aperture can give you...

(I love Leica glass, but these aren't Leica samples; one's a Canon, the other a Tamron lens shot)

 

[bmattock]

Well, I don't care what anyone calls it...

Kodak Aero-Ektar 7 inch f2.5 - wide open, mounted on Pentax *ist DS.

Best Regards,

Bill Mattocks

 

[Gabriel M.A.]

In my somniferous stupor, I had missed the point of the original post. Duh.

Well, of course bokeh isn't just "out-of-focus". If you see the two attachments I posted, one has evidence of bokeh, the other one has no evidence of bokeh whatsoever. So bokeh is not an "out of focus area", and even less (unless you're sacrilegous) a "soft out of focus area". The problem has been that the "bokeh" word has been used so much by people that don't even know what it is that it has further confused those who didn't even know what it was in the first place.

Hence you have many people throwing the towel, and then crying that the Emperor has no clothes; but in this case he does, and sometimes they are gorgeous, sometimes they are a pain to look at.

To some it all tastes like chicken, and as long as it fills you up it's all good. Others are more, shall we say, selective.

So to each their own, no need to fight over it. In the end, it's about the photography, not the concepts. Leave that nit-picking to the forums (or forae, if you must) at Photo.Net, not here.

 

[Doug]

Well, of course bokeh isn't just "out-of-focus". If you see the two attachments I posted, one has evidence of bokeh, the other one has no evidence of bokeh whatsoever.

If you read the references cited, you'll find that bokeh IS just "out of focus", and without any hint of what nature of out of focus. And both your attachments show considerable bokeh.

Here's a brief email comment from Roger, a very capable English<-->Japanese translator who has lived and worked in Japan for several decades...

Subject: Re: [CVUG] Nokton Bokeh
From: Roger Williams <roger@adex-japan.com>
Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2003 10:13:23 +0900
To: CosVoigtUser@topica.com

Roger rises to the bait...

On Thu, 21 Aug 2003 23:57:41 +0900, Dean Johnston <dean@tbc.t-com.ne.jp> wrote:

> Although I live in Japan, and I know what the word means (e.g. bokeru, a
> verb for both being senile [become senile - with perhaps connotations of
> having a faded/blurred memory], and just for faded or blurred), I don't
> actually know exactly what the Japanese mean when they use it in relation to
> photography. I had assumed it was for anything blurry. Perhaps Roger would like to comment?

The word "bokeh" is usually used with the word "aji" as "bokeh-aji" where "aji" means taste or flavour, so the Japanese are recognising that the out- of-focus areas can have very different subjective feelings to them. All lenses have bokeh, i.e., produce blurry out-of-focus images, but what the images LOOK like can be rather different.

Hope this helps,

Roger

 

[aizan]

If you see the two attachments I posted, one has evidence of bokeh, the other one has no evidence of bokeh whatsoever.

yeah, can you explain this one?

 

[Film dino]

Bokeh of course- if it ain't broke don't fix it

 

[Gabriel M.A.]

yeah, can you explain this one?

No problem:

A very easy to read, slightly technical "explanation" of bokeh:

http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/bokeh.htm

Can you now see which one exhibits bokeh qualities of the lens, as well as oof and blur, and which just shows oof, blur but no bokeh? 🙂

 

[aizan]

uh...i'm just going to assume that was a joke...

 

[Gabriel M.A.]

I'm confused by why you think my last post is a joke. 😕 If you want me to further clarify what I said, I'd be glad to do so. If what I have posted is not understandable, then I'll try next time to make my post's language more general (I can only guess at this point that's what the problem is). I'll try to be more aware of that next time.

 

[aizan]

ok, so how does one have bokeh and the other not at all?

 

[Gabriel M.A.]

The first one (the grapes picture) exhibits the bokeh qualities of the lens (look towards the top center). The other one exhibits no concentration of blurred points of light which show the bokeh qualities of the lens, so you can only see the DOF effect of this lens.

In the first picture you can, of course, also see the DOF effect of having the lens used wide open, the blur, etc., but it is also because you can see how the points of light have been rendered in the oof area that you can see the bokeh quality of this lens. You can see how the cones of light render the smallest point(s) with a pleasing blur distribution around their edges. You cannot see any of this (well, I can't) in the other picture, because there are no "small points of light" that are in the oof area of the picture. That is how I evaluate bokeh first.