Does short DOF help making good picture?

Gabriel M.A. said:
Let's really argue about it: do you think that Mark Twain would have been "more effective" had he applied a sentence structure more commonly found in Shakespeare, or more like that found in Edgar Allan Poe?

How many pages of it would "help making good literature"? Shakespeare uses contrived constructions compared to Truman Capote, and Poe certainly would have found Capote "cheating" by borrowing from reality and "simply" telling the tale, instead of thinking it up.

Does non-fiction make good literature? Does fiction make good literature?

Does narrow DOF make good photos? Does deep DOF make good photos?

It was said earlier: tastes are different. "Good" is not an absolute.
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OK, so by the same reasoning; does a rhyme make good poetry? Does irregular metre make good prose?

If I'm writing you a limerick you get five lines rhyming 1,2,5 and 3,4 it's the nature of that particular art, when you write me a sonnet I expect fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, if I look at a photograph I expect to see a picture ... and only expect to be distracted by a myopic blur with very good reason.

To go back to the original question "really, do these wide apertures with thin DOFields help us to end up with better pictures?" the answer is; mostly no
 
Regarding the Lowy shot I think it would have been a better image if the lady were within the DOF. So he should have closed the aperture a bit still leaving the background oof.

My favourite shot is the one of Saman.

Regards,
Steve
 
I think it's partly genetics. Some people do like lots of bokeh and some people don't like bokeh at all. Some people dislike busy bokeh because it is 'distracting' but others actively seek it out. There's much in it about taste which I reckon is significantly influenced by the genes. The reason for these opposite likes is that it helps the human race survive better. Imagine everyone loved Brussell sprouts and it was a daily staple and then it turned out that some substance in them causes bird flu to become fatal in 100% of cases. There would be a mass wipe-out. Nature's strategy against this is opposite tastes, and that effects everything not just food. As for myself: I find bokeh attractive but having had time to shoot wide-open a lot and reflect on it I've realised that it only really suits certain kinds of portraiture. For my contextual people photos, where the people are still very much the subject, I prefer to tone down the bokeh, so now I often shoot my 50mm at f5.6 which gives just the right amount. Where the people are not the subject, rather the whole scene, then no bokeh.
 
Patrick, examples are fine but IMHO none of them has been shot at the widest aperture or the one next to it, as this was the essence of this thread as I intended. First, at close distances, a 105mm lens as in Steve McCurry's sample would deliver a limited depth of field no matter how it's stopped down.. Mr. Gibson's sample, even we assume that it was shot with a 50, the bricks on the background hint to somewhat smaller than f4... Assume that Mr. Allard shot it with a 35, then to get the "cart" there as it looks one needs to go beyond f2.8.. Mr. Saman's picture shot wide open? What sort of wide open is that to show the white spot (snow?) on the mountain miles behind?

What I really intended to point out to some photographs I frequently come cross in popular photo sites, shot as if for the sake of shooting wide open only, rather at exotic apertures like f1.4, 1.2 or even 1.0, looking sometimes not dissimilar to staring at the same scene with crossed eyes... And some even go further to do the same in the name of making art...

Regards,

Bob
 
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There are no rules in photography, no rights and wrongs. A good picture is good because it's elements work well, whatever they may be.

Following trends may help make your pictures more appealing to the target audience. As you have noticed, shallow DOF is popular among many photographers currently, especially the young.

Nevertheless, a good picture is a good picture.
 
While I agree with your conclusion I would suggest photography is the one art that is stuffed full of rules, aperture/shutter speed ratios, film speed and it's chemistry, light, refraction and reflection of lenses and the rest, no?
 
I think one of things driving the trend to shallow DoF is also cinematography. More and more films and ambitious TV series (e.g. Nurse Jackie) are using shallow DoF as part of their signature cinematographic language. I personally like the dramatic, intimate effect.

Does shallow DoF make a better picture? I think the question is silly, like does B&W make a better picture? Or, does vignetting make a better picture? DoF is one of the tools we have, so we should use it when it makes sense. Like all style elements, it should not be overused.
 
It's funny because I think just the opposite is happening.
In a world where high ISOs allow people to shoot more frequently with moderate (f. 5.6-F.11) apertures, I'm seeing too much of the world in focus.
Sharp backgrounds are fantastic when they convey something meaningful. But a sharp background that adds nothing to the image is one of the quickest ways - in my opinion - to ruin a photo.
 
As someone pointed out previously, before 35mm and smaller formats became dominant, the problem that most photographers faced was too little DOF. If you've ever tried to figure out the Schiempflug calculations to increase DOF for large format photography, you'll understand the torturous lengths that photographers had to go to try to get the important things sharp in their photos.
 
There seem to be two unexamined assumptions running through much of what has been written.

1. That shallow DOF is an artistic choice that can/should be "explained" to justify its use in a photograph, but the same is not true of extreme or "normal" DOF, which is viewed as the default. Picasso did not need to explain why various figures were not more true-to-life, or why they were not set against backgrounds filled with realistic detail.

2. That artistic and aesthetic judgments can/should be informed by an inventory of favored and disfavored examples from the past. This is not structural engineering, where it would make sense to ask why so few houses have been made out of bacon.
 
Matthew Runkel said:
There seem to be two unexamined assumptions running through much of what has been written.

2. That artistic and aesthetic judgments can/should be informed by an inventory of favored and disfavored examples from the past. This is not structural engineering, where it would make sense to ask why so few houses have been made out of bacon.
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Are you claiming that art should be evaluated in vacuo, separate from historical context? If not, what are you claiming here?
 
Sparrow said:
While I agree with your conclusion I would suggest photography is the one art that is stuffed full of rules, aperture/shutter speed ratios, film speed and it's chemistry, light, refraction and reflection of lenses and the rest, no?
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Literature is also stuffed full of rules (grammar, syntax, spelling, tenses...)

The fact that hardly anybody on the intertoobes can tell it's from its and their from they're from there, does that make Joyce a bore?

Good pictures, like literature, require many things. Getting hung up on one thing make both creator and critic stale.
 
semilog said:
Are you claiming that art should be evaluated in vacuo, separate from historical context? If not, what are you claiming here?
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Naturally, of course not. Context, historical and other, informs most assessments of art and other things. Historical context encompasses all sorts of things, including an understanding of why no photojournalist in his right mind would be running around during most of the history of photography shooting at f/1.4, regardless of what his or anyone's ideas about the perfect picture happened to be. But historical context is not the same as an inventory of historical examples. When the discussion starts to revolve around what percentage of shots in some person's personal canon had this or that characteristic, something important is being lost. No one today would make a so-few-in-the-canon argument about subject matter, although the reason for this difference is unclear.

At one time paintings without religious or historical subjects were very scarce. Today, not so much. At one time, someone could ask "how many great artworks have been photographs?" Today, not so much. Part of being aware of historical context is seeing how artistic and aesthetic judgments are not universal but are tied to the time and place they are made. Ours are no different. This is not to say that someone who scoffs at Thomas Kinkade is the same as someone who scoffed at Van Gogh, but the observer's time and place always bears considering.

I suppose what I would have been claiming, if I had been claiming more than I wrote, is that there are limitations to a backward-looking, counting-based approach to aesthetics, and that some of those limitations are on display in this thread.
 
Matthew Runkel said:
...including an understanding of why no photojournalist in his right mind would be running around during most of the history of photography shooting at f/1.4, regardless of what his or anyone's ideas about the perfect picture happened to be.
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Correct. It would typically have been a Speed Graphic or a Rolleiflex with even less DoF than that 50/1.4.
 
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