Is bokeh falling out of favor?

[aperturemind]

Wow, thanks for all the responses — I didn’t expect this thread to get this much activity! Really appreciate hearing everyone’s perspective.

It’s interesting to see how many of you treat bokeh as a tool or a consequence rather than the main point. A lot of what’s being said about context, composition, and intention resonates with me. Makes me realize how often I see blur treated like it’s the whole show online, when in reality it’s just one element in the story.

I think what’s stuck with me from all this is that wide apertures and shallow depth of field aren’t inherently “good” or “bad” — it’s all about how they serve the image.

Feels like I’m rethinking how I approach wide-open shots, not just for effect, but for how they help tell the story I’m trying to capture.

What about bokeh as cultural phenomenon? I'm now noticing more youtube videos (basically podcasts) where only the host's face is in focus, the background blurred. But is bokeh on a downward trend with still photography? This thread is 19 years old now, but there has been a year and a half gap since the last post...

Thread 'The ultimate Bokeh thread; pics please'

Nov 26, 2007

Don't blame it on me, blame it on John, this thread was his idea 🙂

Quality of bokeh is clearly subjective - heck, even my perception has changed.
I used to search for "donuts" and "footballs" in the background of a shallow
DOF picture.

These days, I care less about that, and look at the 3d rendering that I feel
a lens provides.

So, please post example pictures, of what you think is good and bad bokeh,
which lens at which aperture you used, and why you like/dislike the lens'
OOF performance.

I'll start (the pic that triggered this)...

• ferider
• Replies: 1,980
• Forum: Optics Theory -

 

[Out to Lunch]

About 92.5 % of photos are taken with smartphones. I suppose mostly with wide-angle lenses in combination with small sensors. This results in less bokeh and greater depth of field. So perhaps not so much an issue of 'out of favor'.

 

[Oren Grad]

I'll just keep making my photographs the way I do... 😀

👍

Yes, that's what matters.

 

[Godfrey]

Pick up any pre-internet photography magazine and check the lens reviews. You won't find any bokeh test, bokeh quality marker, bokeh comparison or even the word "bokeh".

You will find some brief mention about out of focus blur in the context of aberrations or whether a lens was over/under corrected etc..

Bokeh was elevated to a holy grail status in the age of the internet by connoisseur influencers. Some of the internet sensesional bokeh lenses (i.e. Helios, or trioplan ) I find them to be mediocre lenses.

Maybe people got sick of the bokeh bubble. I too bought some shares of it but sold them off - now my most used lenses are very low on the "excellent bokeh" list.

Newcomers to this hobby should be more interested in how you compose a picture, how you meter the scene, how you use the light, how you choose your subject, how you develop it or scan it right .. etc..

Yes.

I never bought in. I understood how to use depth of field and exposure long long before the bokeh craze consumed the chatworld. Some of the terminology crept in, and I thought I had the word "bokeh" nailed, but I don't speak Japanese.

As said before, I'll just keep on making photographs the way I always have. 🙂

G

On the Beach at Kihei Surfside Resort - Maui, Hawaii 2025​

 

[ellisson]

"F8 and be there".
-WeeGee (Arthur Fellig)

 

[38Deardorff]

"F8 and be there".
WeeGee (Arthur Fellig)

I agree.... i think of the background in compositional terms. I agree bokeh....was a catchy word adopted from another language...by internet influencers.

 

[p.giannakis]

Going off on a different tangent here, studying the pictures of the great masters, they separate the main subject from the background not with bokeh but by printing the background in lower contrast or increasing brightness. I find it a better way to create subject separation from background.

Some pics by E. Erwitt

 

[ellisson]

Yes, once upon a time in the early 20th century before any idea of digital cameras, lens of f1.4 or faster, and uber high ISO sensors, when you used your Graflex and sheet film or other manual focus film camera, you wanted the subject(s) and context in your composition and you wanted it in focus. Camera, lens and film state of the art meant you needed a flash and plenty of bulbs. Out of focus effects were not high on the list of image attributes.

Razor thin DOF is like hoola hoops and pet rocks. A craze that will pass.

 

[Richard G]

My first photograph on Tri-X with my M2 and 50 Summilux was of the three pointed star on the front of my father’s Mercedes. The blur and grain of the darkened windscreen were just enough. I still didn’t know almost anything about photography properly back then. The car was in a carport. I didn’t yet have a light meter. I think it was f1.4 at 1/1000s.

One advantage of that silver Summilux being stolen was getting a black Summicron, so much lighter. Traveling, neither you nor anyone else wants a snap like a close up of a tap, the only thing in focus. Street photography doesn’t prioritize bokeh, but silhouettes and high contrast maybe. von Overgaard stated that Leica lenses are to be used wide open. My most used lens almost always is, at f5.6. Compactness is what I prize now in a lens. I mostly use f2.8 lenses, and mostly at f5.6. As others have said, ISO control changes everything.

With close-ups, true macro in particular, banality is hard to escape. Stewie Griffin’s mocking in one ear is an essential guide. Where the blur is and how much all have to be justified. The attempt at mystery, wide open, usually banishes mystery and the photo falls flat.

So yeah, a lot of us are over bokeh, mostly. It’s a crutch, wrapped in a boast, inside a fog, mental, and occasionally it’s just beautiful.

 

[Ko.Fe.]

Bokeh is for lonely gearheads, nothing to shoot, bokeh helps.

Less and less are using cameras with lenses.
New Kardashians trend is digital P&S, no bokeh with those.
And not much from mobile phones.

 

[splitimageview]

I think a significant factor behind the bokeh craze was due to (a) the ease of taking digital photos without the expense of film and development and (b) the explosion of experimenting with adapted lenses on mirrorless cameras.

Mike Johnston’s bokeh ratings pdf came out in 2005, note this was prior to a digital M and prior to the first interchangeable mirrorless. DSLRs ruled the roost back then and the challenge there with adapting lenses was nailing focus with manual lenses as the AF focusing screens were not designed for that. Still, many Canon DSLR shooters spent a lot of time working through those issues (including physical mirror conflicts and replacement focusing screens) with lens mounts like Zeiss Contax/Yashica or Leica R.

I was part of that adapted lens mania, having purchased the very first mirrorless interchangeable lens camera (Panasonic G1) way back in 2008. I was adapting lenses to micro 4/3 before there were commercially available adapters to do so, and there was great interest on the online communities of that era (many of which are now defunct.)

When the adapting craze took off, the only real comparisons that mattered were wide-open aperture (or close to it) as comparing lenses when stopped down wasn't all that interesting.

From there, the boh-kraziness took off...

 

[Godfrey]

Going off on a different tangent here, studying the pictures of the great masters, they separate the main subject from the background not with bokeh but by printing the background in lower contrast or increasing brightness. I find it a better way to create subject separation from background.

Some pics by E. Erwitt

View attachment 4885041

View attachment 4885042

Love those photos, but I somehow suspect that the backgrounds were not intentionally 'printed' lower contrast or lighter... I think that was just the ambient dust/haze/UV scatter influencing the B&W films of their day, which were much more blue-UV sensitive than later panchromatic B&W films. A good photographer took that into account and use it to best effect. This difference in the film spectral sensitivity from those days is where the notion that one should always have a UV filter on the camera came from... It was a practical response to the hazy effect caused by UV scatter. 🙂

That's my take on it, which I learned from when I was first making photos. Every 'old salt' in the photo industry would insist on fitting a UV filter whenever I bought a lens, but the somewhat more modern B&W panchromatic films of the middle-1960s and into the 1970s had reduced the UV hazy effect by quite a lot such that I almost never noticed any significant difference unless I happened to be shooting at high altitude.

You can see this hazy effect to some degree with modern orthochromatic films, but even in them the old UV sensitivity is much more controlled.

G

 

[stampfiddler]

Is bokeh falling out of favour? I sure hope so, at least as a photographic term.

As others above have pointed out, this was not a thing until digital came along with its tiny sensors and short, short lenses through which pretty well the whole scene is sharp front to back. Then people looked at images made with larger format cameras (with their longer lenses) and discovered the laws of optical physics many of us have been familiar with for a long time. Not everything is sharp and sometimes it's a nice effect.

The depth of field created by a lens for any photograph can be an important compositional tool. Or it can be a source of great frustration when you are trying to use an 8x10 view camera to make a photograph of a green pepper inside an old funnel. But having a lens that is pitched as having "buttery bokeh" is not high on my list of required equipment.

 

[trix4ever]

Hard to believe it's been 20 years since he published the lens bokeh ratings (available for download here for those interested.)

Thank you for this link, I've just downloaded it. Very interesting.

 

[Harry the K]

Where does all the bokeh- hate come from? I don't quite get it.
In 1990, long before the general use of the internet, , Nikon introduced the 2.0/135 DC- Nikkor, a lens built to optimize - bokeh!

 

[rulnacco]

I have never ever cared one bit about bokeh, personally. And I have a huge bookshelf with over 500 photo books sitting on it, many of them by the greatest practitioners in the history of photography. In all those books there is not a single photo that is made better nor is lessened in any way by the bokeh.

 

[splitimageview]

Where does all the bokeh- hate come from? I don't quite get it.
In 1990, long before the general use of the internet, , Nikon introduced the 2.0/135 DC- Nikkor, a lens built to optimize - bokeh!

And the 105/2 DC...Nikon on the leading edge. 😉

 

[boojum]

On the thread subject, it has great value in model photography where the emphasis is on the model and nothing else. It declines in value from there. But the topic is a little like pixel-peeping: yeah, alright, what else is on your mind?

 

[valdas]

If you search RFF using keyword “bokeh”, this question of love and hate (asked in different ways) reappears every 5 years or so 🙂 . Answers are more or less the same. But that’s OK, I guess…

 

[Freakscene]

If you search RFF using keyword “bokeh”, this question of love and hate (asked in different ways) reappears every 5 years or so 🙂 . Answers are more or less the same. But that’s OK, I guess…

Memory is an attempt to pose impossible questions, a strategy to govern what we know, a way to shape the past to our understanding of the present.
W.G. Sebald

There are several threads that come around periodically, like an ex- who won’t go away, or a creepy uncle at holiday time.

Bokeh just _is_. The notion that it came with digital photography is a western one; it was much discussed in Japanese photo magazines from the late 1980s on, and, to a lesser extent, former Soviet bloc photography magazines from the early 1990s. Maybe it was over-used, but the internet in general has proliferated large amounts of unedited work of all sorts. Blur was just what was fashionable when the internet took photography worldwide.