# Is bokeh overrated?



## mfrankpdx (Jan 12, 2011)

Shortly after I got my first DSLR, I just had to go out and get the 35mm f1.8 that got so many rave reviews.  I wanted to get rid of all that distracting clutter behind my subjects that, in my mind, really made my photos weak.  After I got it, it never left my camera, and I went around shooting everything wide open, or f2.8 at a minimum.  I really liked how it blurred the background of the photos compared to my kit lens, but there was still something missing.  My photos were still pretty darn boring.  "What's gives?" I asked myself.

After the frustration of not seeing any improvement in my photos, I read a book on photography to see if it would shed any light on my situation.  After reading it, and filling my brain with more info than it could really handle, I became inspired again and gave it another go.  With the new concepts (the ones I could retain) fresh in my mind, I grabbed my kit lens, set my camera to aperture priority f8, and went out shooting.  Much to my delight, my photos seemed markedly improved.

So what was my mistake the first time around?  What were my photos missing despite having the faster, sharper lens?  My mistake was that I was using bokeh as a catch-all to isolate my subject.  Bokeh obviously is one of many great tools for getting a good composition, but when used alone, with not other composure techniques, it creates a pretty weak image.  When I went out shooting at f8 all day, I used new-to-me techniques to eliminate distracting "clutter" from the frame.  I crawled on the ground, climbed up in the trees, made my way through brush and other obstacles in order to get just the right angle.  After doing all this, I didn't even need any bokeh to create more pleasing images.

Everyone seems to want to run out and get the fastest lens possible!  Not necessarily because of light issues, but because they create that "beautiful creamy background".  What if, instead, we went out and bought a speedlight and learned how to compose without needing to turn the background to mush?  Would we better off?  Is using bokeh, often just taking the easy way out of getting a good composition?  So, the question is...  is bokeh overrated?

[Flame suit on]


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## Light Artisan (Jan 12, 2011)

Eh, it's photography's buzzword at the moment. The word is used like it's a type of photography, when in reality it's one small aspect.

I like it best when it isolates a subject from the background, but used 'just because it's bokeh photography' is something you do the first month or two you get a DSLR - everyone goes through it. You'll read tons of it every year from December 24th through around February, then it dies off until tax return season.


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## sobolik (Jan 12, 2011)

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


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## Derosa (Jan 12, 2011)

No, not overrated.  Simply one of many tools at our disposal.  I am very much a beginner, but it is pretty easy to see that there are times when bokeh is desirable and times when it is confining.


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## white (Jan 12, 2011)

It's a stupid buzzword. But defocusing the background to place emphasis on the subject is still a valuable technique.

Sounds like your tastes have changed. You prefer nice clean compositions. Some don't.



> Is using bokeh, often just taking the easy way out of getting a good composition


Nonsense. A defocused b/g can be just as distracting. Nothing like a huge, blurry hotspot to call attention away from the subject.


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## Boomn4x4 (Jan 12, 2011)

"Bokeh" has only been around since 1997, its a fad.  It gets tossed around in books and the Internet because its fun to say.  Since its fun to say, it must be fun to use.... who dosen't want to say, "Check out my bokeh!?!  "How's my bokeh?"  "Is that bokeh in your pants, or are you just happy to see me?"


In reality, DOF has been around since the dawn of photography.  Up until 1997, nobody was striving for good "DOF".... the goal was only to have a DOF that accentuates the subject.

I'd like to say that like with most fads, "bokeh" will go away and people will go back to using DOF creativly, but with such a catchy phrase, I think people will continue to use it.


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## manaheim (Jan 12, 2011)

errrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr... _what?!_

Ok, first to the poster's original point (which I think many of you are missing)...

OP... your pictures presumably didn't improve because you switched apertures... they improved because you studied and thought a bit about composition.  You changed two variables at the same time... the aperture... and your knowledge.  If you flip your aperture back to "wide open" I suspect you'd find that your pictures are still better.

All this said... like _anything_ in photography, you have to know how and when to apply it.  Wide open can be pretty dangerous in a lot of situations (like taking a picture of someone and focusing on their nose, only to find out their eyes are out of focus), but used appropriately and well it can yield some very cool results.

An example, if I may...







Frankly, I think people's giddiness over "bokeh" (and I find the term trite and foolish) is silly, and people who rush out to buy a lens that can go down to 2.8 exclusively for the purpose of extremely out of focus areas are really missing the boat... as, I believe, so are you.

See, a lens with a very wide aperture is more often than not also an EXTREMELY good lens with high quality optics, excellent color reproduction, etc.  I have 3 2.8 lenses and a 1.8, and I almost never run them wide open, because wide open is frequently not the appropriate choice.

As far as the guy who was saying "bokeh" comes from an imperfect lens... I believe that article may be full of crap.  On a quick scan it looks like he's mixing bokeh with sloppy lenses and calling them the same animal.  I could be wrong here, but I have other things to do so I'm not going to agonize over it.


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## Abby Rose (Jan 12, 2011)

I think it's pretty. But I like shallow dof in most types of pictures. 

But I agree; it can't replace a good comp in the first place.

Using a smaller aperture helped you see better compositions and whatnot. So if you go back to a wide open aperture and the bokeh again, you're probably still going to be better than you were when you relied on the bokeh to make the image. I think.


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## Overread (Jan 12, 2011)

> So, the question is...  is bokeh overrated?



It sounds a little like you've swapped f1.8/f2.8 and instead shifted to using distances and naturally more sparse backgrounds to get the less distracting background elements. It's hard to say without seeing comparison shots from both periods of your shooting experience. 
However to me it still sounds a little like you're using the same compositional method, but that you've changed the method of acquiring the reduced clarity of the background areas. At the same time it sounds like you were not that happy with razor thing depths of field and that you are preferring a deeper depth of detail to your foreground subjects.


In the end background blurring is a compositional tool that photographers have access to and it is one that many newer photographers latch onto early on. In fact it is partly making things easier in that composing a shot with a less distracting background is a far easier task than working with a deeper depth of field and getting both foreground and background elements to blend well together.


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## Alter_Ego (Jan 12, 2011)

Without bokeh a lot of photos would look flat and boring


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## Light Artisan (Jan 12, 2011)

If this had no 'bokeh', you would be hard pressed to find the birds! 

You don't always have a choice of background - life happens.




Light Artisan 7526 by Light Artisan Photography, on Flickr


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## Overread (Jan 12, 2011)

Light Artisan said:


> If this had no 'bokeh', you would be hard pressed to find the birds!
> 
> You don't always have a choice of background - life happens.



However I'm willing to bet that "shutter speed shutter speed - low ISO" was more at the forefront of your mind than "darn must get that background blurry" 

Often times many discussions of a photographers fantastic selection of settings are - in reality - more the result of them being pushed into a pigeon hole of very limited settings as a result of the environment and the lighting present. 

Of course the above is very much bias toward environments with less control over the subject and environment (eg wildlife ) than those where you have control over both (eg studio)


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## Light Artisan (Jan 12, 2011)

Yes and no... I generally try for no more than f/5.6 when shooting birds in general but shutter speed is the top priority. I even let set ISO to auto and let it roam up to ISO 1600 at will to get the shot with less blur and accept some noise.

Back to bokeh... it's really no different than panning and getting perceived motion, or using fast shutter speeds to stop motion... it's a technique, something to make the photo appear how the artist intended. Sometimes it's an evil must, others it's a welcome choice.


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## MichiganFarts (Jan 13, 2011)

It's just another proving factor that individuality is a myth, and everyone just jumps on bandwagons.


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## manaheim (Jan 13, 2011)

<tangent>
Hey Light Artisan... try giving that picture a little more contrast and I think you'll be very pleased with the results.
</tangent>


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## enzodm (Jan 13, 2011)

I think what is overrated is the use of term "bokeh" for indicating conscious DoF control (two different things). Only the former is now something subject to fashion and hype.


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## o hey tyler (Jan 13, 2011)

Boomn4x4 said:


> "Bokeh" has only been around since 1997, its a fad.



#1 Dumbest Statement of 2011 so far.


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## 3bayjunkie (Jan 13, 2011)

actually Bokeh is not a "buzz word" it is an actual term that originated in Japan and is used to describe an images in-focus and out-of-focus components.


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## Derrel (Jan 13, 2011)

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...


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## RauschPhotography (Jan 13, 2011)

Overrated? I don't think so, but it certainly can be overdone. I'm not the biggest fan of bokeh-themed photography, but small details can be very nice in the background.

For example:







I know it's not the greatest picture, but the bokeh in the background isn't overwhelming. Adds a nice background without taking away from the subject itself.


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## mfrankpdx (Jan 13, 2011)

What I got from this thread now, is that bokeh isn't necessarily overrated, but rather it's become a popular term among newer photographers and more often than not, is misunderstood by them (myself included).

And, the technique of using a shallow DOF to bring attention to the subject is is one of the concepts beginner photographers grasp easily and early on.  And of course, the term "bokeh" will come up often when discussing shallow DOF images.

So my learning experience didn't really have anything to do with bokeh.  Rather it was more about framing a photo in a new way so I no longer needed a shallow DOF to bring my subject to the viewers attention.

Thanks for the replies!


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## Overread (Jan 13, 2011)

Oneday when I get good at this composition stuff I really want to work at doing some shots with powerful foreground and background components rather than just the foreground element dominating the scene


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## ausemmao (Jan 13, 2011)

I don't think too many people want bokeh for its own sake, at least I'd hope not because blobs of light by themselves aren't all that interesting. But it does seem that the isolation aspect is pretty good - after all our eyes end up doing similar things when looking at objects at different distances, so it's an easy way to reintroduce a 3D aspect to 2D images. 

As for the fast lenses, I know I got mine because it allowed me to use ambient light in far more situations indoors and out. 1-2 stops is half to a quarter of the exposure time - a pretty big deal I think


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## benlonghair (Jan 13, 2011)

Bokeh isn't overrated at all. It just isn't the thing to do on every photo. I love to find a subject that works well with what ends up being (if you were a watercolorist) a color wash

This shot has fake bokeh (ie not out of the camera) and was really not a strong image until I blurred the background. 




Female Eastern tiger swallowtail (Yellow form) by ben_long_hair, on Flickr

Here's another couple that would not have worked with a sharp (or even busy) background. 




Praying Mantis: Connecticut's State Insect by ben_long_hair, on Flickr




DSC_0220honey bee by ben_long_hair, on Flickr


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## c.cloudwalker (Jan 13, 2011)

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.


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## MichiganFarts (Jan 13, 2011)

c.cloudwalker said:


> 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.
> 
> ...



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?


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## c.cloudwalker (Jan 13, 2011)

MichiganFarts said:


> c.cloudwalker said:
> 
> 
> > Bokeh is overrated in two ways.
> ...



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...


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## PASM (Jan 13, 2011)

Maybe he means its become a kudos type term to bandy-about without any discrimination in terms of quality. You see it on flickr... "love the bokeh"..when it looks horrible. A cheapo lens used fully open..bright edges..bright centres..double lines, nauseous swirl - yuk 


LOL btw


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## c.cloudwalker (Jan 13, 2011)

PASM said:


> Maybe he means its become a kudos type term to bandy-about without any discrimination in terms of quality. You see it on flickr... "love the bokeh"..



I agree but it doesn't mean I have to accept it. it is nothing more than BS is what I'm saying.

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


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## MichiganFarts (Jan 13, 2011)

c.cloudwalker said:


> 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...



Let me help you.  In order to come to the conclusion that I was saying bokeh in itself was an exaggeration...you would have to think that I was saying laughing in itself is an exaggeration, which I did not.

I said the use of the term LOL was an exaggeration...therefore I would be referring to the use of the term bokeh...and not to it's existence.

These things are called analogies.  

*a·nal·o·gy*

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d&#658;i/ 

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  noun, plural -gies.  1. a similarity between like features of two things, on which a comparison may be based: the analogy between the heart and a pump. 


The similarity being, both are terms that have caught on popularity via the internet.  I hope this has helped, but I'm not surprised if you say it didn't, just to sound like a smartass.  Which is also overused on the internet.  In fact the irony is, I'm am doing the same right now.


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## c.cloudwalker (Jan 13, 2011)

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.


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## PASM (Jan 13, 2011)

:thumbup:



c.cloudwalker said:


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


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## MichiganFarts (Jan 13, 2011)

c.cloudwalker said:


> 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.


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## PASM (Jan 13, 2011)

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


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## manaheim (Jan 13, 2011)

Derrel said:


> 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.


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## sobolik (Jan 14, 2011)

Derrel said:


> 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?


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## mishele (Jan 14, 2011)

manaheim said:


> Derrel said:
> 
> 
> > 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?
> ...



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


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## Derrel (Jan 14, 2011)

sobolik said:


> Derrel said:
> 
> 
> > 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?
> ...



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????


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## OrionsByte (Jan 14, 2011)

c.cloudwalker said:


> MichiganFarts said:
> 
> 
> > c.cloudwalker said:
> ...



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.


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## Light Artisan (Jan 14, 2011)

> 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.


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## gsgary (Jan 14, 2011)

sobolik said:


> 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."
> 
> ...




Here we go again


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## OrionsByte (Jan 14, 2011)

Light Artisan said:


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



As used today, yes.

As originally intended, no.


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## gsgary (Jan 14, 2011)

sobolik said:


> 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."
> 
> ...




Have you looked at his galleries there is nothing special


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## Light Artisan (Jan 14, 2011)

OrionsByte said:


> 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.


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## OrionsByte (Jan 14, 2011)

Light Artisan said:


> OrionsByte said:
> 
> 
> > As used today, yes.
> ...



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



Light Artisan 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.


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## Light Artisan (Jan 14, 2011)

I see what you're saying now... thanks for explaining it better. What I was leading at is that if someone called it bokeh once (for a good out of focus area) and blur another (for a poor out of focus area). Bokeh isn't the quality in itself... it is what it is, out of focus.


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## Derrel (Jan 14, 2011)

Here is a pretty good primer on the subject, but it only fills in one piece of the puzzle.Bokeh


Another article with some samples:
Bokeh sampler page

A page showing how physical vignetting of the light ray can cause unusual shaped specular highlights; this is usually called "cat's eye" bokeh. Some lenses, like the Sigma 30mm f/1.4, have this issue quite pronouncedly.
Swirly Bokeh Testing

Here is a free .PDF file with rankings of lenses according to their typical bokeh potential--written by *the guy* who introduced the word bokeh to the English-speaking world back in the late 1990's.

http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/files/bokehrankings5.pdf

One of the single biggest problems currently is that the term "bokeh" is being misused by millions of newbies, who think it refers exclusively to out of focus specular highlights in a photo background, usually from light sources like street lights, Christmas lights, candles, etc.

I just want to make one point about the subject by way of analogy: in America, there are millions upon millions of people who are perfectly happy with microwave cooked food out of a box. There is also a sub-set of the American population that likes gourmet cooking, and appreciates the flavors imparted by oven roasting, pan searing, broiling, poaching, and hand-tending to cooking food. One group dismisses chefs and culinary skill as pretentious crap, and nukes its dinners in cardboard boxes bought from Costco. The other group shops at high-end grocery and produce markets, and lavishes care on its food and its preparation.


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## Bitter Jeweler (Jan 14, 2011)

Bokeh!!!!


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## Overread (Jan 14, 2011)

^^^ Pretty!


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## mishele (Jan 14, 2011)

Still love that shot!!


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## manaheim (Jan 14, 2011)

I like pie.


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## syphlix (Jan 14, 2011)

everything is situational


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## mishele (Jan 14, 2011)

I love bokeh..........


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## mishele (Jan 14, 2011)

manaheim said:


> I like pie.



Exactly what kind of pie?? Apple....cherry?? Maybe Key lime?


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## Mike_E (Jan 14, 2011)

no


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## andy700 (Jan 15, 2011)

Bitter Jeweler said:


> Bokeh!!!!




Now that is great "Bokeh", I particularly like the opposite colour spectrum bit in the middle, and the way in which the flower is really vibrant.


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