Bokeh is dead - Long live SOFA!

Bokeh is dead - Long live SOFA!

  • Bokeh Forevah!

    Votes: 389 57.5%

  • SOFA, coz i'm a modern guy/gal

    Votes: 67 9.9%

  • Who cares, it's the in-focus area what matters! (Don't you dare to choose this option!)

    Votes: 221 32.6%
  • Total voters
    677
Could it be that the objection to Bokeh is cultural? West vs. east? How strange! Some suggestions smack of "purity of language" like some countries with their depart of preservation of the native tongue. Others suggest combining words to make new words - very Germanic. Oh well. Bokeh came from Japan and does the job intended,
Just a thought,
Johne
 
Pherdinand said:
loofa is very close to the male horse's genital said in the ugliest possible way, in hungarian.
It's out of question.
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Oh, sheez, thanks. Now I'll think of that when using the loofah. I wonder if "lather" or "conditioner" aren't a dirty word (oh the irony) in some other language.
 
A major photografic goal for me is to have everything in focus. The golden standard is our eye which has such a huge dof that we never see anything out of focus unless we put a finger right into one of our eyes. Often I use background redo's in Photoshop for many reasons including enjoing the side benefit to see everything in sharp focus. Bokeh is something purely artificial and extraneous to our visual world. It is already hard to match our visual perception let alone introducing such ugly exogenous artifacts. Why not be fond of aberrations, color fringing, flare,gosts etc etc. Once I made a stat on hundred of Photos of HCB. Just a couple were not all in sharp focus and they were the ugly ones. Sometimes Homerus sleeps....
 
Sometimes I like the omnifocal approach to photography, for landscape or cityscape shots, and perhaps these are analogous to the way we perceive what we see. But any still photograph is ultimately a two dimensional abstraction from the four (or more) dimensional real world in time and space, and is not as true a representation as video or cinema moving images. It's actually quite interesting sometimes to go further into the abstraction way of photography, to represent what you do see, but what your eye and brain filter out: the out of focus blur.

The Japanese do love to invent short words for complex artistic ideas, while Westerners love their acronyms and contractions, like LASER, LED, NASA or Jasta. I'm rather ambivalent about the term boke, because it's not a concept the Japanese invented, like they did with the process of ukiyo-e woodblock printing, for example. The American Photo-secessionists loved their selective focus and blurring, even using techniques like smearing lenses with petroleum. Selective focus and blur characteristics have long been talked about by Western cinematographers.

I think it's fine for us to invent and use other terms in place of boke, though I prefer OOF (for out of focus) to SOFA, which looks like the synonym for couch to me. Although OOF does sound like what you say when getting hit in the abdomen, at least oof!'s not a real noun. The short phrase "defocus blur" would also be good as English jargon for the phenomenon.
 
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Pistach said:
A major photografic goal for me is to have everything in focus. The golden standard is our eye which has such a huge dof that we never see anything out of focus unless we put a finger right into one of our eyes. Often I use background redo's in Photoshop for many reasons including enjoing the side benefit to see everything in sharp focus. Bokeh is something purely artificial and extraneous to our visual world. It is already hard to match our visual perception let alone introducing such ugly exogenous artifacts. Why not be fond of aberrations, color fringing, flare,gosts etc etc. Once I made a stat on hundred of Photos of HCB. Just a couple were not all in sharp focus and they were the ugly ones. Sometimes Homerus sleeps....
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The eye does not always have infinite depth of field. One reason why it's harder to see at night is that the pupil expands to let in more light and depth of field is reduced. If you do want to simulate the way the eye sees, then I suppose you could aim for deep DOF in bright light and shallow DOF in low light conditions.

Clarence
 
clarence said:
The eye does not always have infinite depth of field. One reason why it's harder to see at night is that the pupil expands to let in more light and depth of field is reduced. If you do want to simulate the way the eye sees, then I suppose you could aim for deep DOF in bright light and shallow DOF in low light conditions.

Clarence
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Plus, when we really focus on something (such as when interacting with another person), our brain filters out the surroundings, such that we aren't even aware of OOF elements. So we think that everything is in focus, but it's not.
 
The author of my 1957 Nikon Manual mentioned, almost in passing, that the human eye at any one moment can sharply focus on an area about equivalent to the field of view of a 135mm lens.

If you stare at something with one eye closed, and don't move your eyes, you see that this is more or less correct. It appears to be a combination of optics and brain-processing. If you don't move your eye, you can see outside the circle of sharpness, but for me it grows both optically indistinct and, for want of a better phrase, mentally though not optically vignetted.

However, our brains are marvelous at stitching together scenes. My entire field of view within the frames of my eyeglasses is equivalent to a 21mm lens. But if I pay attention to what's going on, my eyes are darting all over the place to put together my view of a scene.
 
Nope - gonna stick with boke (anglicized and shortened from "bokeh" because I'm not Japanese but am a semi modern guy/gal). Boke is an encompassing concept that goes beyond "soft" or "silky". In this sense, SOFA is an excessively restrictive description.

But as an acronym, the "S" in SOFA could also be "silly", "stupid", "stupendous", "sh***y", "scintillating", or perhaps counter to the proposition, "sharp". In this sense, the acronym is excessively vague and imprecise.

- John
 
jlw said:
So, if we adopt the new acronym, lenses with particularly excellent out-of-focus rendition might become known as SOFA kings? As in, "I'd really like to buy that new Summilux, but it's SOFA king expensive"...?
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AAAAHH! now I'm really LOL - wish I'd read this part of the thread first! Thanks jlw. ALL my lenses are SOFA King expensive! SOFA King GREAT! and SOFA King likely to have my spouse sending me to the SOFA to sleep! HA!

- John
 
danwilly said:
Bokeh, now Sofa, I still don't know what GAS means.
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Gear Acquisition Syndrome - the mental disorder that causes RF owners to purchase more and more equipment, often including multiple bodies, copies of lenses, and sometimes vintage equipment so they can pad out their equipment taglines in all honesty.
 
I went with bokeh simply because it suggests to me a better way to think about lenses in general - much like flowers or wines ....scents vary, appealing to some, not others but all still evocative of floral images for each of us, sharp tight rose buds with a gentle hint of attar or a big, flouncy iris with only a trace of scent.

I think rather than stick with the technicalopurist "bokeh" I will rather go with bouquet.
 
Someone on photo.net used "bouquet" instead of bokeh. I liked it, since the distinctive character of a wine is sometimes called its bouquet. If you think of lenses like wines, each with its own unique character, then it fits.

Works for me.
 
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