Bokeh. and DOF..warning...opinion follows!

tipota said:
You have not really been haunted by reversal if you haven't shot on ORWO (r.i.p.) material once...... ;-)
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Ahhhhhh... Only ever heard about it... But they have such nice advertisements lol:

(NSFW, That's right, ORWO shows some skin lol)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsC6T3pJssA&feature=related

maybe I'll order some from here and try it out just to remind myself how AMAZING even the lowest end camera's of today are:

http://www.filmotec.de/

Remember changing bags and counting sprockets? Steinbeck's and hot splices? PAYING MONEY FOR CROSS DISSOLVES??? I feel luckey, and maybe bit nostalgic, to have caught the tail end of the indie FILM era... It helped me a ton to really understand the entire movie making process. I'm not saying that people need to learn on film, but you tend to think about each shot more when you have to meter everything (NOT DIGITALLY EITHER) and shoot blind without any idea how the film will come out once you've PAID for processing, transfer, color timing, prints, etc... I feel like all those hours paid off for me in the long run.
 
videohog said:
ps, isn't bokeh a Japanese word?
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It comes from the Japanese word boke. But the spelling was altered to bokeh by Mike Johnston, editor of Photo Techniques magazine in 1997 (link). The term bokeh is really a product of the digital photography generation. Before digital, everyone just called it the out of focus area or out of focus blur or something to that effect. It's kinda like how today some people say "nice capture!" or "nice pics!" instead of "photo," "image," or "shot." Ugh, I don't like the word "capture." I just can't get use to that word.
 
AdrianF said:
The problem when a technique becomes over used, is it becomes really cheesy and cliched, so people eventually start reacting against it and avoid using it. That's a real shame, when it's such a fundamentally important technique as controlling depth of field, it just places limitations if you're avoiding shallow dof. Use wisely
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Totally agree, you summed it up nicely.
 
HDkilledFILM. said:
I feel like all those hours paid off for me in the long run.
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In film academy we shot our first "films" on an old Ernemann hand-crank camera from 1916 or so ... then had do develop the negative ourselves ... and make a print with the help of a self-constructed optical bank. I believe it was helpful in a) learning where we came from, b) developing even more respect for the incredible work of classic film-makers.

Growing up with film, I see one thing I really miss today: The extreme concentration on set for at least trying to get it right with the first or second take. And not littering the edit-suite with tons of "data" that drowns the editor. But:panta rei. My DoP and I often tell the team now: "Let's try to work as if we had film."

ORWO tried to get rid of the old AGFA process only as late as 1989 I think - ironically nearly exactly when the wall came down and all of the eastern film-industry collapsed. And I wonder that there is still a company around that sells product with that name. As students we used their stock because it was, compared to Kodak, Fuji or Agfa much cheaper and we were sitting in West-Berlin and could get hold of it easy. But it was dreadful at times because the tolerances in the chemistry of the emulsions where sometimes a bid unpredictable - so processing could become a nuisance.

Love the clip. It shows why we said "by, by" to the GDR so easily apart from the political inclinations: The official culture was so terribly "petit bourgeois". Yikes!
 
videohog said:
ps, isn't bokeh a Japanese word?
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And all along I've been calling it Brokeh. No wonder I didn't understand it!


[TABLE="width: 475"]
[TR]
[TD="class: word"]brokeh[/TD]
[TD="class: tools"][/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD][/TD]
[TD="class: text, colspan: 2"]noun: (1) the budget impact of purchasing high-end photography lenses to get better bokeh (2) the feeling you get when your spouse discovers the price of your camera gear[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
 
that's hilarious... especially the wife part. My wife freaks every time she hears the UPS truck or sees a B&H bag
 
At least lenses are easier to "sneak" into the house, try coming home with an exotic sports car.
You will be buying your wife nice jewelry for a very long time!
 
snp said:
And all along I've been calling it Brokeh. No wonder I didn't understand it!


[TABLE="width: 475"]
[TR]
[TD="class: word"]brokeh[/TD]
[TD="class: tools"][/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD][/TD]
[TD="class: text, colspan: 2"]noun: (1) the budget impact of purchasing high-end photography lenses to get better bokeh (2) the feeling you get when your spouse discovers the price of your camera gear[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
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Hahaha, good one man!

That's what I really enjoy about m4/3, really, just enough DoF to balance nicely between subject sharpness and out of focus areas. Others can keep their 5DMKII, I like my GH2 and AF100 just the way it is :-)
 
David W. Jones said:
At least lenses are easier to "sneak" into the house, try coming home with an exotic sports car.
You will be buying your wife nice jewelry for a very long time!
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Lenses sure can be brought in without letting the spouse know. But she'll anyway find it out once you get the camera out to take her pictures! And driving home in an exotic car wouldn't do a lot of harm - one wouldn't have much money left in the bank. So no money for any jewelry for a long time - Yay! :D
 
yes and...

yes and...

Piolet said:
It comes from the Japanese word boke. But the spelling was altered to bokeh by Mike Johnston, editor of Photo Techniques magazine in 1997 (link). The term bokeh is really a product of the digital photography generation. Before digital, everyone just called it the out of focus area or out of focus blur or something to that effect. It's kinda like how today some people say "nice capture!" or "nice pics!" instead of "photo," "image," or "shot." Ugh, I don't like the word "capture." I just can't get use to that word.
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And the meaning of the term was "the aesthetic quality of the out of focus area," not the amount of the image out of focus. So to ask the question we so often read on these boards "which camera has more bokeh?" is utterly meaningless. First of all cameras, sensors, filmstocks don't create bokeh, lenses do. (You can say that certain DOF adapters create bokeh, too, but that's another topic.) But even asking "which lens has more bokeh?" is nonsensical. It's like asking which musical phrase has more mood. The music may be happy, lively, sad, aggressive, langorous, etc. but they're all moods. Similarly you can say a lens has a bokeh which is harsh, prismatic, creamy, flat, ghostey, swirly, crisp, astigmatic, spherical, sloppy, snappy... even dank, sticky or kind and I wouldn't necessarily take issue (unless the bokeh was shwag). But you can't say a lens has more bokeh: it's meaningless and it's a misuse of the term.

I too am tired of the over-used aesthetic of shallow depth of field myself, but I don't blame the word "bokeh" for that. In fact I'm equally tired of the misuse of the term. It's a pretty useful concept, just as useful as MTF, color rendition and contrast, and we don't have another word for it. We just need to use it better and and more precisely. Back to Shooter's original post, he describes out of focus highlights that show the shape of the aperture blades. That's harsh, geometric bokeh. That's what makes lenses with rounded (and more) aperture blades more pleasing (one aspect of nicer bokeh).

On to Ikelgott's (Hej då) example of the Harsh Coma. That's another aspect of bokeh: whether highlights blur evenly or have hard outlines or poppy centers. Primes are easier to characterize as one or the other. However, some zooms give hard outlines at one end and specular centers at the other. Others are optimized more at one end or the other. And really since all lenses are compromises in design they all exhibit some optical aberrations which manifest as some character to their bokeh. Not to belabor the point too much, but I think this is worth knowing about if you care about making nice images.

For example, if you're shooting some talking heads on the AF100 in the 35-70mm range at an f4/5.6 split (not crazy DOF mind you) and you have two lenses that cover that, which one do you pick? (By definition, they're both giving you the exact same depth-of-field.) The one that gives you pock-marked septagrams and an oddly double-imaged bookshelf in the background, or the one that slips smoothly into a creamy blur? Shwag or kind? That's bokeh.

As a side note, even without the word "bokeh" I bet 90% of the readers of this forum are making these distinctions all the time, without having a word for it. When I see comparison footage or stills I can't help but look at what else the lenses are doing, "Why do I like that? Why don't I like that? What's bugging me about this image?" And a lot of the time it's what's happening in the out of focus areas, in the negative space. On another note, there's no such thing as shooting without bokeh unless absolutely everything is in focus. Even Citizen Kane had bokeh.

I love DOF that shows camera blur naturally and for a purpose. ie focuses attention to the subject without distraction of any bg bokeh" crap"
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Just so you know, Shooter, I'm not disagreeing with you, ultimately that's what the discussion and concern with bokeh is all about.* All the rest is peacock feathers.


*(Well not entirely, some people might want to embrace harsh/aberrant bokeh artifacts to create a particular look--there's even kind of a cult following around old lenses that give radial distortion to their bokeh. But those who don't see it are doomed to assault us with harsh imagery.)
 
I had 'bokeh' as my last tiles in a game of Scrabble and the 3 other blonde gal players wouldn't allow it.

But they accepted 'ebohk' and I won!

Cheers.
 
I'm with you on this Shooter. Which is why I just bought a 1/3 sensor. Which is why I also wished RED released the 2/3's scarlet.
 
dustylense said:
It's sort of like Ansel Adam's f64 movement. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_f/64
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I may take some heat on this but after sitting through a number of screenings of recent projects by various people shooting with large sensor cameras, I find the shallow DOF aesthetic being used as a crutch for composition or art direction. This discussion is also about broken in motion pictures.... A frame grab with a beautiful soft focus back. Ground may excite you but too much sugar gives you cavities. What does the shot look like when all the parts are in motion.? Does your subject fall in and out of focus in an unmotivated way?
 
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