Is bokeh overrated?

[c.cloudwalker]

Frankly my dear I think you need a lot more help than I do... both with your english and though process.

And your obnoxious signature is not going to help your case.

 

[PASM]

:thumbup:

Let's worry about shooting interesting photos instead of "bokeh."

 

[MichiganFarts]

Frankly my dear I think you need a lot more help than I do... both with your english and though process.

And your obnoxious signature is not going to help your case.

I'm guessing by your comments you still haven't figured out I was agreeing with you.

This sorta feels like when I first watched my son try to walk...only without all the excitement.

 

[PASM]

Let's create some interesting, pleasing bokeh while not obsessing about it.

 

[manaheim]

Boke, Anglicized to bokeh in the 1990's by Michael Johnston in his articles that introduced the concept to the west, is a concept that the Japanese have used for decades. There are culturally significant differences between the way Asian people and Occidental people "see" photographs and paintings. We in the west tend to focus immediately on the foreground objects,and disregard the background objects in a painting or a photograph. THose born and reared in Asian cultures do NOT immediately focus on the foreground objects, but instead look at the background quite a lot, and use it to "place" the foreground objects into their context. This is fairly new information, unknown to most people outside the field of visual perception, which is my wife's doctoral field of study. So...is it any wonder that the Japanese language has a word for the blurry part of photographs? You know...the language of the country where the vast majority of the world's lenses have been made since the 1950's???? A country with a history of landscape painting that dates back thousands of years?

Bokeh is vastly misunderstood by the majority of casual photography enthusiasts. Bokeh refers to the quality of the out of focus areas of a photo, but many people today think it just means "shallow depth of field work". There are quite a few lenses that tend to produce good bokeh, and other lenses produce some harsh, or unusual bokeh effects. Not to sound elitist, but those who pooh-pooh the existence of bokeh are often those with the least training in the visual arts, or who are simply not well-educated in the finer points of photography. A lot of American commercial photographers, who shot everything for years in front of plain, seamless backdrops never saw any bokeh because all their work was of a flat-plain, evenly lighted piece of paper cyclorama...

Most thought-provoking thing I've seen here in a while. I'm going to have to save this and research it a bit more. Thanks for posting, Derrel.

Sadly... no one will really read your post.

 

[sobolik]

Boke, Anglicized to bokeh in the 1990's by Michael Johnston in his articles that introduced the concept to the west, is a concept that the Japanese have used for decades. There are culturally significant differences between the way Asian people and Occidental people "see" photographs and paintings. We in the west tend to focus immediately on the foreground objects,and disregard the background objects in a painting or a photograph. THose born and reared in Asian cultures do NOT immediately focus on the foreground objects, but instead look at the background quite a lot, and use it to "place" the foreground objects into their context. This is fairly new information, unknown to most people outside the field of visual perception, which is my wife's doctoral field of study. So...is it any wonder that the Japanese language has a word for the blurry part of photographs? You know...the language of the country where the vast majority of the world's lenses have been made since the 1950's???? A country with a history of landscape painting that dates back thousands of years?

Bokeh is vastly misunderstood by the majority of casual photography enthusiasts. Bokeh refers to the quality of the out of focus areas of a photo, but many people today think it just means "shallow depth of field work". There are quite a few lenses that tend to produce good bokeh, and other lenses produce some harsh, or unusual bokeh effects. Not to sound elitist, but those who pooh-pooh the existence of bokeh are often those with the least training in the visual arts, or who are simply not well-educated in the finer points of photography. A lot of American commercial photographers, who shot everything for years in front of plain, seamless backdrops never saw any bokeh because all their work was of a flat-plain, evenly lighted piece of paper cyclorama...

Where did you quote this from?

 

[mishele]

Boke, Anglicized to bokeh in the 1990's by Michael Johnston in his articles that introduced the concept to the west, is a concept that the Japanese have used for decades. There are culturally significant differences between the way Asian people and Occidental people "see" photographs and paintings. We in the west tend to focus immediately on the foreground objects,and disregard the background objects in a painting or a photograph. THose born and reared in Asian cultures do NOT immediately focus on the foreground objects, but instead look at the background quite a lot, and use it to "place" the foreground objects into their context. This is fairly new information, unknown to most people outside the field of visual perception, which is my wife's doctoral field of study. So...is it any wonder that the Japanese language has a word for the blurry part of photographs? You know...the language of the country where the vast majority of the world's lenses have been made since the 1950's???? A country with a history of landscape painting that dates back thousands of years?

Bokeh is vastly misunderstood by the majority of casual photography enthusiasts. Bokeh refers to the quality of the out of focus areas of a photo, but many people today think it just means "shallow depth of field work". There are quite a few lenses that tend to produce good bokeh, and other lenses produce some harsh, or unusual bokeh effects. Not to sound elitist, but those who pooh-pooh the existence of bokeh are often those with the least training in the visual arts, or who are simply not well-educated in the finer points of photography. A lot of American commercial photographers, who shot everything for years in front of plain, seamless backdrops never saw any bokeh because all their work was of a flat-plain, evenly lighted piece of paper cyclorama...

Most thought-provoking thing I've seen here in a while. I'm going to have to save this and research it a bit more. Thanks for posting, Derrel.

Sadly... no one will really read your post.

I read it!! I also thought it was very interesting!! Good stuff!! Thanks Derrel

 

[Derrel]

Boke, Anglicized to bokeh in the 1990's by Michael Johnston in his articles that introduced the concept to the west, is a concept that the Japanese have used for decades. There are culturally significant differences between the way Asian people and Occidental people "see" photographs and paintings. We in the west tend to focus immediately on the foreground objects,and disregard the background objects in a painting or a photograph. THose born and reared in Asian cultures do NOT immediately focus on the foreground objects, but instead look at the background quite a lot, and use it to "place" the foreground objects into their context. This is fairly new information, unknown to most people outside the field of visual perception, which is my wife's doctoral field of study. So...is it any wonder that the Japanese language has a word for the blurry part of photographs? You know...the language of the country where the vast majority of the world's lenses have been made since the 1950's???? A country with a history of landscape painting that dates back thousands of years?

Bokeh is vastly misunderstood by the majority of casual photography enthusiasts. Bokeh refers to the quality of the out of focus areas of a photo, but many people today think it just means "shallow depth of field work". There are quite a few lenses that tend to produce good bokeh, and other lenses produce some harsh, or unusual bokeh effects. Not to sound elitist, but those who pooh-pooh the existence of bokeh are often those with the least training in the visual arts, or who are simply not well-educated in the finer points of photography. A lot of American commercial photographers, who shot everything for years in front of plain, seamless backdrops never saw any bokeh because all their work was of a flat-plain, evenly lighted piece of paper cyclorama...

Where did you quote this from?

I did not quote it, I wrote it...this is about the third time in 18 months that I have touched upon these same,exact points. My wife did doctoral work at Rutgers University, in the field of research psychology, and the department head there, Maggie Shiffrar, was a Stanford-educated specialist in visual perception. There are a number of studies dealing with all aspects of visual perception that I was exposed to due to my wife's extensive readings. The fact is, eastern and western cultures have differing ways of evaluating scenes...there *are* some culturally-specific differences between the way those of us in the west view a photo, and the way Asian-culture-reared people view a scene.

For example: who here has walked into a Chinese restaurant and witnessed one of their traditional painting styles, that of a series of ever more distant mountain tops, each one obscured by greater and greater amounts of atmospheric haze? Take a look here Aerial perspective - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This type of painting technique was in use in China for well over 200 years before it even began to move to European painting...European painters were still drawing heavy, crude, black outlines around people in paintings, and struggling miserably to convey vanishing points and distance in paintings, while the Chinese were cranking out sophisticated visual representations using very advanced concepts.

See why boke, the Japanese concept, was understood in Japan, but was not even codified by a word in western cultures????

 

[OrionsByte]

Bokeh is overrated in two ways.

1/ Even though it is a fairly new idea around these parts fewer and fewer people know what it actually means.

2/ I've never heard of a photo getting famous or not because of the bokeh.


There are a number of responses in this thread showing #1 and there have been a few threads title "my bokeh photo..." showing the same thing. How does one take a photo of a quality? The last time I heard, bokeh is nothing more than the quality of the blur.

I had to look it up because until showing up on this forum I'd never even heard of the darn thing. After some 30 years in photography... :er:

Forget the darn bokeh and go shoot some interested images.

I see it like this. Laughing has existed for a long time. Writing about laughter has existed for longer than I have been alive.

LOL, on the other hand, is a complete product of the internet, and popularized and used for EVERYTHING that's not even funny...

I'm not laughing out loud, sitting at my computer...

This is the age of exaggeration via internet...hence...bokeh! how's my bokeh? where do I get bokeh from? Is bokeh on sale this week?

I don't get your point but I'm not surprised.

Bokeh is not an exaggeration. It is real. It just isn't a big deal with serious photogs. A good example of that is the bokeh from a lens I just sold. A Minolta 250mm mirror lens. Mirror lenses can and will give a doughnut shaped bokeh if not used correctly. However this lens sold for $675 even though it is about 20 years old.

I wonder why...

He's already pointed out that he's agreeing with you, but just for the record I wanted to say that I totally got his point, and I think it's a very apt analogy:

Anyone that is laughing out loud might say (in written form), "LOL!"
Not everyone that says, "LOL!" is actually laughing out loud.

The quality of the out-of-focus areas of an image is called "bokeh."
Not everyone that uses the term "bokeh" is referring to the quality of the out-of-focus areas of an image.

Both terms were originally used to describe something very specific. Both terms were popularized by the internet. As with many things popularized by the internet, this has led to over-use of both terms to the point where the original definition is a bit diluted. People use "LOL" anytime they think something is funny, even if it barely made them smile. People use "bokeh" anytime there's something out-of-focus in a photograph, even if they're not terribly concerned with the quality of it.

I don't know if that's any clearer or not. Bokeh itself is not overrated, it's just another tool in the photographer's arsenal, and like anything else, whether or not it works is dependent on the context and the artist's intent. The word bokeh is overrated because it's misused so often.

And Derrel, that was a fascinating read, thank you very much. You should pop over to Wikipedia and clean their article up a bit.

 

[Light Artisan]

The quality of the out-of-focus areas of an image is called "bokeh."

Out of focus area = bokeh, period.

There is good bokeh and bad bokeh, each to be determined by the person viewing it. For example, I wouldn't look at one photo and say that is blur and another photo and say that is bokeh!

Bokeh has nothing to do with the quality.

 

[gsgary]

Bokeh is quite often an excuse to help justify the large sum of money spent on a fast lens. The vast majority of photos do not require such a lenses bokeh. I have photos all over my house and I see one that has a well done bokeh. And 2 that probably would have benefited by a better bokeh but no one has ever mentioned it. The large number being the rest have no need for bokeh good or bad.

"This quality is of special importance to portrait photographers who almost always want soft backgrounds. In their case, any sharpness will detract from their subjects and so many of these photographers demand lenses with uncorrected spherical aberration for their work."

i.e. Bokeh is actually the result of a lenses flaws.

"The rendering of out-of-focus points by a camera lens is called "bokeh" and it is commonly ignored by lens users and lens designers for the simple reason that "good bokeh" (the images on the right) is created by imperfect lenses, or lenses that exhibit "spherical aberration"."

Bokeh - the least understood lens property | Andre Gunther Photography

Here we go again

 

[OrionsByte]

The quality of the out-of-focus areas of an image is called "bokeh."

Out of focus area = bokeh, period.

There is good bokeh and bad bokeh, each to be determined by the person viewing it. For example, I wouldn't look at one photo and say that is blur and another photo and say that is bokeh!

Bokeh has nothing to do with the quality.

As used today, yes.

As originally intended, no.

 

[gsgary]

Bokeh is quite often an excuse to help justify the large sum of money spent on a fast lens. The vast majority of photos do not require such a lenses bokeh. I have photos all over my house and I see one that has a well done bokeh. And 2 that probably would have benefited by a better bokeh but no one has ever mentioned it. The large number being the rest have no need for bokeh good or bad.

"This quality is of special importance to portrait photographers who almost always want soft backgrounds. In their case, any sharpness will detract from their subjects and so many of these photographers demand lenses with uncorrected spherical aberration for their work."

i.e. Bokeh is actually the result of a lenses flaws.

"The rendering of out-of-focus points by a camera lens is called "bokeh" and it is commonly ignored by lens users and lens designers for the simple reason that "good bokeh" (the images on the right) is created by imperfect lenses, or lenses that exhibit "spherical aberration"."

Bokeh - the least understood lens property | Andre Gunther Photography

Have you looked at his galleries there is nothing special

 

[Light Artisan]

As used today, yes.

As originally intended, no.

The definition of bokeh has never changed. Interpretation by some, maybe... but that doesn't mean it's any different than it ever was.

 

[OrionsByte]

As used today, yes.

As originally intended, no.

The definition of bokeh has never changed. Interpretation by some, maybe... but that doesn't mean it's any different than it ever was.

Alright, let me put it this way. Earlier in the thread you said:

There is good bokeh and bad bokeh, each to be determined by the person viewing it. For example, I wouldn't look at one photo and say that is blur and another photo and say that is bokeh!

Bokeh has nothing to do with the quality.

If you're calling the bokeh "good" or "bad", you are making an assessment of its quality. You can't measure bokeh in the same way you can measure depth-of-field - it's a purely subjective, aesthetic concept.

Bokeh is like taste; you can add salt and spices to a food to change it's taste, but it never stops having a taste, and it's not going to taste the same to everyone. You can have whole discussions about food while talking only about taste. Chefs prepare food with the hopes that it will result in a nice taste. But taste itself is not an ingredient - it is a result of the ingredients, and therefore it would be completely irrelevant in a discussion about nutrition.

Does that make sense? Are we on the same page? All photographs have bokeh (even if it's not perceptible), but it's only our assessment of it, our opinion of its aesthetics, that distinguishes it from depth-of-field.