Is Bokeh an overated property of an image?

Is Bokeh an overated property of an image?

  • Yes

    Votes: 191 51.8%

  • No

    Votes: 157 42.5%

  • I used to be decisive but I'm not so sure now

    Votes: 21 5.7%
  • Total voters
    369
  • Poll closed .
maybe it's evolved

maybe it's evolved

but as a Nihonjin, we use it for meaty flavoring, or glutamate, specifically.

BTW, I have a book that says dogs can and will eat all essential amino acids whether food is tasty or not, while cats will not necessarily do the same, but eat to get full or to satisfy taste only.

semilog said:
Umami is *very* well defined. It is the taste of protein. Specifically, it's the taste of glutamate (an amino acid). You have taste receptors on your tongue for sour, salty, sweet, and umami. [Edit: and bitter, too; how could I, of all people, forget bitter? ;-) ]

Interestingly, our umami taste receptors are crippled compared to those of rodents. Mice can taste all 20 naturally-occurring amino acids. (Mice in which the umami receptor has been deleted and replaced with the human receptor taste only glutamate.)
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it's an analogy

it's an analogy

but not a good one.

If you read the Zeiss and other articles on bokeh, you will understand it is qualitative, and quantitative. A lot of slide rules and now computers have been used at Leica, and other great lens companies specifically so they don't produce ugly bokeh...

Brian Sweeney said:
That certainly sums it up, and is a wonderful analogy.
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crawdiddy said:
Is 'silence' an important element of musical composition?
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IMHO it's not a valid comparison in any way... Apart from being a pro photographer (work, career) I am a pro musician (work and career too, although I left both playing and composing for photography many years ago).

Music is an art that happens through a line of time, and when there's silence in music, it has an absolute effect: nothing balances with silence at the same time... In music silence is as important as music... Apart, silence is a part of the natural auditive surrounding we're used to.

Plastic arts, and especially those in two dimensions are not a journey through a timeline, and all their elements live together in a constant balance... And different and progressive levels of defocusing as seen on a photograph are not a natural part of our eyesight...

If you want to use music and sound for your comparison with bokeh, you should compare bokeh (secondary visual importance) and on focus subject (primary visual importance) with two auditive situations of different importance too... For example the noise an audience produces during a recorded concert... Of course that noise (shouts, singing, applause, etc...) must be carefully treated and softened for the mix before making a CD, and of course we all want that noise not to interfere with the music, and of course we can compare noises from different CDs or sound engineers to pick the ones we prefer... But what matters a lot more is the music, not the noise... Talking a lot about the noise would be overrating audience noise... Who is interested in bad music with a well treated audience noise?

Cheers,

Juan
 
zumbido said:
Reading what you said literally, you think depth-of-field is important (which, obviously, it is). Not bokeh.
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No, I’m speaking specifically about bokeh, per the treads topic.
The inherent DOF characteristics of any particular lens with regards to its OOF rendering is a given.
 
ampguy said:
but not a good one.

If you read the Zeiss and other articles on bokeh, you will understand it is qualitative, and quantitative. A lot of slide rules and now computers have been used at Leica, and other great lens companies specifically so they don't produce ugly bokeh...
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Whatever. I know about computers being used to design optics. It makes it much easier to do the job than using the calculators, and before that - slide rules. My senior optical engineer told me so. Bokeh of a lens forms a large part of the image, and the bokeh of a particular lens is responsible for the frequency content of the out of focus portions of the image.

So I like the "Silence" analogy. If the visual content of the out-of-focus portion of the image is below the threshold for recognizing objects in that portion of the image, they will not detract from the main subject.
 
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Juan Valdenebro said:
IMHO it's not a valid comparison in any way... Apart from being a pro photographer (work, career) I am a pro musician (work and career too, although I left both playing and composing for photography many years ago).

Music is an art that happens through a line of time, and when there's silence in music, it has an absolute effect: nothing balances with silence at the same time... In music silence is as important as music... Apart, silence is a part of the natural auditive surrounding we're used to.

Plastic arts, and especially those in two dimensions are not a journey through a timeline, and all their elements live together in a constant balance... And different and progressive levels of defocusing as seen on a photograph are not a natural part of our eyesight...

If you want to use music and sound for your comparison with bokeh, you should compare bokeh (secondary visual importance) and on focus subject (primary visual importance) with two auditive situations of different importance too... For example the noise an audience produces during a recorded concert... Of course that noise (shouts, singing, applause, etc...) must be carefully treated and softened for the mix before making a CD, and of course we all want that noise not to interfere with the music, and of course we can compare noises from different CDs or sound engineers to pick the ones we prefer... But what matters a lot more is the music, not the noise... Talking a lot about the noise would be overrating audience noise... Who is interested in bad music with a well treated audience noise?

Cheers,

Juan
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Dear Juan,

Certainly a parallel I understand.

Cheers,

R.
 
I'm surprised that poll respondents are fairly evenly split on the original question. I expected many people would answer in the affirmative (overrated).
 
Roger Hicks said:
Dear Juan,

Certainly a parallel I understand.

Cheers,

R.
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😀 Just after my post I thought: "Damn! Bad music concerts with well treated audience noise it what sells a lot decades ago!" 😛

The comparison of bokeh and silence is a beautiful and poetical lie: I like it, but it's just too false to even enjoy it for long enough...

Cheers,

Juan
 
It's not over rated and it has merit IMO. If the out of focus parts of an image are part of the photographer's over all concept and he/she wants them to look a particular way then how the lens being used renders these areas is important. I did some multiple exposure images recently where the primary exposure was focused and subsequent exposures were deliberately out of focus so how the out of focus was being rendered was important to me.
 
An extreme case of anti-bokehism 😀

http://www.americansuburbx.com/2009/05/theory-michael-fried-on-two-pictures-by.html


“To Wall's thinking, the resulting image is closer in feeling to ordinary vision, in which we are normally never conscious of objects nearer or farther away being blurred relative to those we are focusing on, as is often the case in photographs....(To achieve such evenness of focus requires the use of a computer to combine more than one image, which is why I didn't characterize the picture as a whole as an instance of straight photography.)” Michael Fried
 
Keith said:
It's not over rated and it has merit IMO. If the out of focus parts of an image are part of the photographer's over all concept and he/she wants them to look a particular way then how the lens being used renders these areas is important. I did some multiple exposure images recently where the primary exposure was focused and subsequent exposures were deliberately out of focus so how the out of focus was being rendered was important to me.
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As another forum member said, if bokeh is an overrated concept, it doesn't mean it has no place at all... But it's secondary... Go get an image of Obama & Lewinsky and you'll see how many people comment on its bokeh... 😀 I wouldn't care about which lens or bokeh I used if I got that image...

Cheers,

Juan
 
Juan Valdenebro said:
As another forum member said, if bokeh is an overrated concept, it doesn't mean it has no place at all... But it's secondary... Go get an image of Obama & Lewinsky and you'll see how many people comment on its bokeh... 😀 I wouldn't care about which lens or bokeh I used if I got that image...

Cheers,

Juan
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Obama and Lewinsky? Noooooo! :bang: Cover their mugs with massive bokeh. Please...🙄
 
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