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Missing the trees for the Forest: A deeper understanding of why to create Bokeh. (post one of yours)

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Jimages Digital is a group moderator Jimages Digital Pro User says:

PLEASE, post one or two of your LARGE SIZE images where you used bokeh to harmonize with your main subject. Please add a lot of detail in the text to describe your image.

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Hi. Jim here.

This is my opinion. I will respond to anyone who posts a thoughtful, non-flaming, non expletive reply. The goal of this thread is to get us thinking, thinking about our photography.

This group description has these phrases:

1. “Rediscovering a small moment in photography called “Bokeh”.

Bokeh (properly pronounced with bo as in bone and ke as in Kenneth,) is not about TIME. It is not a moment in time. but a quality of space. It came from Japanese photography and the spherical arrangement of the blades giving the photograph choices. I think we misunderstand Bokeh: the concept is one of aesthetics of the blur (Roger Hicks)

2. There are so many photographs with Bokeh hidden in our everyday lifes.

No. It’s about fading focus to direct your viewer to the subject.

Bokeh is not an inherent quality of a scene. It is blur, or smudge in Japanese, that comes from a plane of focus created by your lens. Our brain does not have a bokeh setting. Also, pleasing bokeh is subjective. A maximum aperture does not automatically give bokeh. . . bokeh can emerge from chromatic aberrations, out of focus corners of the image area, vignetting– aberrations that occur when the aperture is wide open. . . and these may produce an image we subjectively consider pleasing bokeh.

3. “we tend to unconsciously reset our

minds and forget what we’ve seen.”

No. The true meaning of Bokeh (dotclue.org) is from a Japanese photographic term is ピンぼけ (for the kana-impaired, “pinboke”). It’s a compound word; pin from the Dutch brandpunt = “focus”, and boke from the verb 暈ける (“bokeru”) = “to fade”.

I’ll put forward a proposal: THREE MAIN points.

1. Compose so the out of focus background is in harmony with what you want in focus. Obviously you pros in the Bokeh group know this, so I am speaking to those who are new to bokeh. The point of photography is the subject matter, not the out of focus area.

2. Making pictures just for the quality of the out of focus areas is like missing the tree for the forest .The idea of using a 1.4 aperture setting is Not to create bokeh, but to compose so that the out of focus area supports the subject matter of your image.

How to See Bokeh In Existing Images: _________________________________

Look for points of light in the background. Perfect subjects for this are distant points of light at night or sometimes light shining through leaves or specular reflections in daylight.

If they all blend together nicely, that’s nice bokeh. If they are perfect little circles, then that’s neutral bokeh. If they are all swimmy and look little little rolled up condoms or donuts, then that’s bad bokeh.

If they all are regular polygons that tells you the shape of the lens diaphragm. Yes, you can actually tell how many blades the lens’s diaphragm had!

If they are perfectly round in the middle of the image and oval or lentil shaped at the sides that tells you the image was probably shot at full aperture.

If they are all flattened ellipsoids (vertical ovals about twice as tall as they are wide) then that tells you that the image was shot with an anamorphic lens. You’ll see this in cinemascope motion pictures, not in still photographs.

(This is one person’s opinion, taken From Ken Rockwell, copied by permission of the author. www.kenrockwell.com )

via Flickr: Discussing Missing the trees for the Forest: A deeper understanding of why to create Bokeh. (post one of yours) in Bokeh: Smooth & Silky.