The 28 Summilux and Shallow DOF: Why the newfound malice toward Bokeh??

[IkarusJohn]

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So you never show your photos to anyone?

 

I'm mystified how you reach that conclusion. It just doesn't logically follow that if I take pictures for my own pleasure that I don't show anyone the end results. 

 

Like Mark, I have no online portfolio. If I'm pleased with an image, I might post it on FaceBook, though that's extremely unlikely. I might post it here, as I like looking at others pictures here, but that's about it. If I'm particularly happy with an image I'll get a really good print done and frame it. I will also do projects from time to time, eg a motorbike trip or my niece's wedding, and I'll print a Blurb or Apple book as a present, and sometimes I'll give a print as a present. 

 

Photography is is personal for me. I see no point in flooding the Internet with my pictures. I'm just not interested. I will share them if I think they will give particular pleasure to my friends and family, or if they will generate genuine constructive criticism (not much of that has happened yet). I guess I'm just not much in need of that sort of gratification. 

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[Herr Barnack]

...and if for me it was about sales I'd starve to death   .

As visual artists/photographers, we do our part - it's the buying public that doesn't do their part. 

 

In this area, selling fine art framed prints makes pooping diamonds look easy by comparison; then the tight-fisted "art lovers" wail and gnash their teeth when yet another gallery bites the dust.  

 

If people value art, they must either make it themselves or support the endeavors of those who do.  This is not rocket science.

[Peter H]

It's getting too philosophical now but nobody takes photos for himself. We all take photos to show to others and we're always upset if others don't like our photos

 

This said, it's noteworthy that the general public really loves those shallow DOF shots. If you're after likes on FB that's what you should shoot. It's discriminating fellow photographers and artists who will see through the poor visual content and disapprove

PS. Before anyone jumps in, let me specify that we're talking here about images with poor content not strong images that use shallow DOF as an artistic tool.

 

 

That's not my experience, though I wouldn't be foolish enough to argue with hundreds of Facebook likes!

 

I'm a trustee of an art gallery. I try to encourage photographic exhibitions, among other things, but it's a difficult thing to do if you want photography shows to keep pace with other visual arts in terms of combining original ideas and quality of execution. Anyway, once a year we run an un-curated open show, where anyone may submit work. One of the more regularly heard comments at these shows is along these lines:  "What a shame", the uninitiated viewer says, waving a hand in the direction of two-thirds of the photo in question, "that all that has come out so blurry."

[Herr Barnack]

 

...I wouldn't be foolish enough to argue with hundreds of Facebook likes!

 

This made me think of a poster I saw in my childhood, back in the 1960s.  The image was of a gent sitting at an elegantly appointed table, set with the most impeccable of china and silverware.  There was a large pile of feces on his plate; the caption read, "Eat shit - 500 billion flies can't all be wrong!"

[IkarusJohn]

What an unpleasant analogy.

[edwardkaraa]

That's not my experience, though I wouldn't be foolish enough to argue with hundreds of Facebook likes!

 

I'm a trustee of an art gallery. I try to encourage photographic exhibitions, among other things, but it's a difficult thing to do if you want photography shows to keep pace with other visual arts in terms of combining original ideas and quality of execution. Anyway, once a year we run an un-curated open show, where anyone may submit work. One of the more regularly heard comments at these shows is along these lines: "What a shame", the uninitiated viewer says, waving a hand in the direction of two-thirds of the photo in question, "that all that has come out so blurry."

I think it's age dependent too. Older viewers may be used to more classic photography while the young Facebook generation may be more familiar with the modern trend of blurring the whole image. They even have apps in their phones to mimic the effect

[edwardkaraa]

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I'm mystified how you reach that conclusion. It just doesn't logically follow that if I take pictures for my own pleasure that I don't show anyone the end results.

 

Like Mark, I have no online portfolio. If I'm pleased with an image, I might post it on FaceBook, though that's extremely unlikely. I might post it here, as I like looking at others pictures here, but that's about it. If I'm particularly happy with an image I'll get a really good print done and frame it. I will also do projects from time to time, eg a motorbike trip or my niece's wedding, and I'll print a Blurb or Apple book as a present, and sometimes I'll give a print as a present.

 

Photography is is personal for me. I see no point in flooding the Internet with my pictures. I'm just not interested. I will share them if I think they will give particular pleasure to my friends and family, or if they will generate genuine constructive criticism (not much of that has happened yet). I guess I'm just not much in need of that sort of gratification.

Well, it's just a university course about the psychology of arts I did ages ago. You guys are either exceptions, or you just think you are exceptions

[pop]

This is one of the nice outcomes of discussions like this one: I just have  detected a pleasing symmetry. It goes like this:

 

There are photographers who don't care about the reception of their images; they make the images so that they please themselves. On the other hand, there are photographers who make their images so that they please their intended audience. I suppose that there might be photographers who don't care what the picture looks like as long as it shows what it is supposed to show.

 

Some people expect photographs to be "interesting" or "surprising"; aesthetic considerations may be appreciated but not required and preconceived notions about how a photograph has to look like are avoided where possible. On the other hand, there are people who expect photographs to conform to certain sets of rules, where the rules might of course vary from person to person. Then there must be people who just perceive the content of the image without caring one way or the other how it presents itself.

[CheshireCat]

I am left wondering if this sour grapes attitude toward shallow DOF is a result of the current ragged state of the world economy coupled with the high price of the 28 Summilux.

 

This may well be one reason.

As a matter of fact, a 28/1.4 has more DOF than a 35/1.4, but we don't hear complaints about people buying "nonsense 35/1.4 lenses". I think this is because the "great masters of the past" had 35/1.4 lenses, but never used a 28/1.4 (guess why).

 

Same as the old HCB dogma: Thou shalt shoot stopped-down. Well, if HCB couldn't compose great photos with a lens wide open, it does not mean someone else won't be able to do it. Nobody's perfect, right ? --- oooh blasphemy ! --- 

 

- Wide open photos make the spectator focus where the "photographer's eye" did, and when this alchemy works, the result is much more natural, as our eyes don't "stop down" to make everything sharp.

 

- Instead, stopped-down photos give the spectator the freedom to focus anywhere in the scene. You gain this freedom, you lose the natural look and the "photographer's eye". The RF favors this kind of mindset, obviously.

 

Note how I successfully avoided talking about "bokeh".

... until now... 

One more thing: 99% street photography photos I see on the Internet taken with a stopped down lens do suck. And most of these would suck less if they were taken wide open (why ? keep reading). I beg anyone who is going to shoot random boring street subjects and publish them on the Internet, to do it with the widest possible aperture. At least, I will enjoy the smooth, creamy bokeh 

[IkarusJohn]

Well, it's just a university course about the psychology of arts I did ages ago. You guys are either exceptions, or you just think you are exceptions

Zero sum analysis! I don't think they taught that at any university I attended.

[MarkP]

This is important. If one takes a pic for the main purpose of selling then it has to be influenced by the whims of paying folks. It doesn't matter whether I like the bokeh, composition or HDR. What matters is what they like and I am just a slave.

 

I remember reading someplace where a photographer lamented that he not really likes HDR prints (specially overdone) but that is what sales more than "usual" scenery pics therefore he does more of it. This is totally opposite of shooting for yourself.

Exactly why I wrote that.

[edwardkaraa]

Zero sum analysis! I don't think they taught that at any university I attended.

But you're a lawyer, John. I'm an art historian, or at least that's what I studied

[norm_snyder]

Quite a thread.  In reviewing earlier postings I noted a number of references to historical movements in photography, such as f64, to the differing technical demands of film and digital, and some to the changes in taste/fashion over time.  In looking at photographs I took in the 1970s, I note that some have out of focus backgrounds that are the simple result of my efforts to get the photo, at all.  Sometimes it was the result of dealing with poor light, slow film loaded, happening to have gone out with a short tele and no other lens. Sometimes it was to achieve subject isolation.  I have some shots from that era which I like, some that others like, some that others liked well enough to purchase.  I accept that fashion has changed, and that perhaps some of these photographs now may represent a cliché, athough they did not when I first printed them (40 years ago, now).  

 

It occurs to me that the tastes for specific kinds of "looks" are also being shaped by the many, many photographs (captures?) that are being posted and which are being taken with lenses of, say, 8 or 9mm on small chip devices (whether cell phone or point & shoot with 28mm fov equivalencies), and that vast numbers of people feel that this is the way photos are supposed to appear.  The preoccupation with bokeh seems almost a backlash, the production of myriad photographs with blurry backgrounds perhaps produced by some to prove that they were "real" photographers and not some person with a cell phone who got lucky if they produced an interesting shot.  We've now seen many, many shots like this.  Certainly there are photographers who also use the quality of the out of focus areas of their photographs as a tool in rendering an image.  We've also seen some exhausted, some swept away, some repelled by, or compelled to react to fashion.  I suspect that this is not always intentional.

 

Sturgeon's Law (SF author Theodore Sturgeon) says "90% of everything is crap."  Put another way, Buckminster Fuller posited in the 60s, in an essay in the Pratt Institute annual,  that people often got very excited about anything new in art, architecture, music, etc., and that perhaps as a little time passed, only 10% of this wonderful new production would even be worth remembering. 

 

Somewhere in storage I have an old tuxedo I may be able to wear again someday, when it comes back into fashion.  Perhaps to a gallery opening?

[lct]

Who said that bokeh is just a fig leaf to hide poor composition? Just kidding.

 

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[sblitz]

One of the points of a good picture is to bring dimensionality into it -- compensating for taking a 3D world and putting into a 2D picture. in painting we can play with colors to achieve this. With photography we use light when we can control it. In the street, bokeh is the only way to create the illusion with any consistency since light and color are sort of random to the event, unless it is staged.

[Peter H]

One of the points of a good picture is to bring dimensionality into it -- compensating for taking a 3D world and putting into a 2D picture. in painting we can play with colors to achieve this. With photography we use light when we can control it. In the street, bokeh is the only way to create the illusion with any consistency since light and color are sort of random to the event, unless it is staged.

 

I disagree.

 

The photography is such a fundamentally different thing from painting that I don't think this really works.

[sblitz]

If you think bringing in dimensionality into a photograph through light color focus and bokeh, a subset of focus, doesn't matter okay with me

[Herr Barnack]

What an unpleasant analogy.

Thank you - I'm glad to hear that you enjoyed it. 

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Hallo,

Look here: Leica M

[uhoh7]

What an unpleasant analogy.

Worse, it's unoriginal.

[Herr Barnack]

Well...  I never claimed it was original.