Bokeh is dead - Long live SOFA!

[bottley1]

How about "bollocks" No doubt as to its meaning!

 

[Pherdinand]

is that bollocks or bullocks spelled?🙂

 

[mike goldberg]

When I first came into RFF I wondered what is this "bokeh" stuff everyone is talking about? Then, Wiki helped me out with the definition. My favorite 50 is
the J8... one of the bokeh kings.

Bokeh forevah... yeah!

 

[d30gaijin]

This is about the stupidest poll I have yet come across. If you can't figure out what the term bokeh means then how about doing a bit of research. It is well documented. SOFA can only be a lame acronym for dummies, slackers, and dopes. Do you fit those categories? I think so!

Dummies want to come into a hobby/profession and change the terminology because they're too impatient or too stupid to research or take the time to understand it. How about this, find another hobby with more simple terms you might be able to understand. Jacks comes to mind.

 

[Pherdinand]

Whoa, d30gaijin, thank you very much 😀

The Doped Dummy Slacker

 

[Pherdinand]

by the way why don't you check the entry #4 and take a deep breath 😉
if something sounds too stupid, it probably is meant to be.

 

[arbib]

I call it OOFA (Oh-fa)

I call it OOFA (Oh-fa)

OK, I picked "Who Cares"....Call it whatever you want...I call it OOFA (Pronounced Oh-fa) 😉 (in response to d30gaijin...Your post is so TRUE.....I call it Boken too. It is the nomenclature of photography....Just poking some fun at new acronyms)

If you want nice silky smooth out of focus areas....use a lens with 8 blades and up....But I seen some nice OOFA with 6 blade lenses too. The BG subject makes difference too. 🙂

I am more interested in the focal length more than the number of aperture blades used...I like more...but that is secondary. I can always apply a gaussian filter in editing if the OOFA is not what I want. 😀

Now when I want a nice OOFA from the get go....I will use the lens that has more blades

Cheers

 

[CK Dexter Haven]

"A major photografic goal for me is to have everything in focus. The golden standard is our eye which has such a huge dof...."

Of course, it's all a matter of personal taste, but i would take the opposite approach. BECAUSE the eye works that way, i'm not sure what is the point of trying to recreate that. Wouldn't that then seem 'common?' Don't we get enough of 'reality' without having all of our art meant to duplicate it? And, we CAN'T duplicate it, so any attempt is either going to be some manner of interpretation, or a failure.

The eye as the "golden standard" is a concept too easily argued. This might also be analogous to a comparison of digital video tape versus black and white film. Compare your own Sony Hi-8 footage versus Hitchcock's Notorious.

 

[crawdiddy]

I'll stick with "bokeh," although I sort of like "blurrifaction." I don't think we need to go out of our way to obfuscate our meaning, or speak in language the general public doesn't understand. We have enough trouble being misunderstood as it is. Bokeh was a new term to all of us, a few years ago. Now it's established.

I happen to be a fan of the bokeh effect also. And of course the eye DOES have limited DOF. It's the darned Adobe PhotoShop brain that tries to clean up all the out of focus areas. That is, until presbyopia sets in, and then it's useless.

 

[JoeV]

I vote against "SOFA" because it implies a misunderstanding of the full ramifications of what Boke is all about: not whether the out-of-focus areas are 'soft' or not, but what is the quality of the out-of-focus area. There can be bad boke and good boke; harsh boke and pleasing boke. The term 'soft' is less descriptive of these subtle but important distinctions.

I'll also vote for spelling it B-O-K-E, with the assumption that this is the closest transliteration of the term from Japanese to English.

Aside from the affect that spherical abberation has on boke, the shape of the lens aperture also has a remarkable affect. Look at the harsh quality of images from consumer video cameras, then look at the shape of their apertures: rarely are they even 6-sided; many are just triangular, or wedge-shaped. These produce terrible boke. Many of the better-boke lenses have apertures of 8 or more blades.

I also don't understand the notion that the terminology doesn't matter; perhaps there are those who don't appreciate the quality of photographic images; one clear distinction that can be made between photography and all other visual arts, and even biological vision, is glass-lensed (i.e. refractive) images have limited depth of focus that's affected by the size and shape of the aperture, and the specifics of the lens itself. Before optical imaging began to affect painting, this phenomenon was never seen in art. And although biological optics are refractive, the human retina/optic nerve/visual cortex seems to adjust focus and piece together a composite image that appears to be widely in focus.

So my argument is that, if narrow depth-of-focus is uniquely photographic, why shouldn't we be precise on what we call this affect, and how we describe its quality?

~Joe

 

[fgianni]

And what you call SOFA if it is not soft, HOFA?

 

[kuzano]

Remnds me of the old line....

Remnds me of the old line....

Six Muntz ago, I culdnt even spel sailsman... Now I are one!!!

If it's not bokeh, why fix it?

 

[Marc-A.]

I like the Japanese "bokeh", so I'll stick to bokeh. But maybe you know that the origins of the term is debated; some people think it does not come from Japanese, but from French "bouquet" (bunch, as in a bunch of flower). When I write in french, I usally use the word "bouquet", because I prefer it, but I don't use "bouquet" when I write in English because nobody would understand ... maybe from now on ...
Best,
Marc

 

[Paul Jenkin]

So, what does "Bokeh" stand for?

"Blurred off-kilter etherial halos"? Too much time spent debating this issue IMHO. I have the lenses I have and they will produce the bokeh they will produce. I can't change it - so why worry about it??

Paul

 

[MikeCassidy]

If its Japanese it would be: bokeha or boke. There is a Japanese word [verb] bokeru: to fade, to dim.

 

[M C H]

From Harold Davis at Oreilly blogs:

"Bokeh comes from the Japanese word boke (ぼけ), meaning blur. The terminology may also be derived in part from bokashi, a blurring ink wash technique used by great Japanese artists like Hokusai. (Bokashi also seems to be a Japanese composting method.)"

Bokeh also has the merit of at least not being redundant - what's with soft out of focus areas, anyway? As opposed to sharp out of focus areas?

Why throw out a term with decades of cultural meaning behind it simply because one hasn't taken the time to learn what it actually means?

As to the "boke" vs. "bokeh" comments, the "h" is added merely for transliterative purposes. Ota-sensei, a visiting Kendo hachi-dan who is living with me at the moment, spells his name variously "Ohta" and "Otah" since coming to the US. It merely draws out the "e" sound since without the "h" "boke" would be pronounced similarly to "broke."

 

[MikeCassidy]

I've seen 'n' by itself but never an 'h'; usually to draw out an vowel you write 'ee' or 'aa.' As in おたあさん.

I agree that I see no reason to throw out the use of Bokeh; unless its bad bokeh then maybe throw out the lens.

 

[M C H]

Yes that's true, Mike. As in Oosaka, which in English is all too often pronounced Osaka. Certainly "boke" is the correct rendering in Japanese (even if in Romaji!). But the "ke" syllable pair is better rendered in English as "keh," as it might otherwise be pronounced "kee" as in "き", or as a purely consonant ending as in "broke."

There is no single "h" in the Japanese syllabary, as you've pointed out. It's only necessary to allow English readers to pronounce it correctly.

 

[MikeCassidy]

On Japanesepod 101 [which I recommend to everyone] a user googled 'bokeh' and to quote:

Actually, a Google search reveals that someone named Mike Johnston worked on a magazine article and added “h” to boke because so many people were mispronouncing it… back in the March/April 1997 issue of Photo Techniques.


As a geek I'm embarassed to say I turned to my small Japanese Dictionary first not google!

There once was akendo school on Madison Ave. Is that your school?

 

[ronazle]

The "h" added to the bo (a dipthong of ho, as indicated by the " following the ho) is a function of the major, but less linguistically useful, romanization of the Japanese language. The more linguistically accurate romanization does not use the "h". There are several different romanizations of the Japanese language.