boke and Japanese aesthetics

[Paul J]

Advertisement (gone after registration)

If one wanted faux presence (as opposed to the other kind) as a component of one's vision for a photograph, how would one go about achieving it?

Presence is subject, composition, timing, intent, light - once known as "photography".

[stevesurf]

There's a nice article that relates background and foreground out of focus rendering to actual optics and lens characteristics.

 

 

 

The sharply focused parts of any image can be thought of as points or collections of points, but away from these -- the out-of-focus areas -- the light spreads slightly and those points become tiny circles. These are the so-called blur circles and, we are told, that as long as these circles are no larger than 1/30mm (originally on a 35mm film), then the average human eye cannot distinguish them from a point. This measure was chosen as the diameter of the so-called "circle of least confusion" with 35mm format film work.

[jaapv]

Missing out that it assumed a 6x9 cm print @ 30 cm.

[120]

I could not find a copy of the Photo Techniques article claimed to introduce the term/notion "bokeh". I am passing along an account of that article found in an APUG forum post. (I did not get much out of it.)

 

QUOTE: The May/June 1997 issue of Photo Techniques published three very informative articles on the matter of bokeh: “What is Bokeh?” by John Kennerdell; “Notes on the Terminology of Bokeh“ by Oren Grad; and “A Technical view of Bokeh” by Harold Merklinger. The last article can be found posted on the internet, while the other two more interesting article are not, and are probably covered by copyright laws, so the only way to obtain them is to buy the back issue of Photo Techniques. I wish Oren Grad had decided to speak up more on the topic of bokeh, since his article is the most pertinent to this discussion. I list some of the salient points and terminology from Oren Grad‘s article:

* bokeh refers to the rendition of the out of focus areas of a photograph, and may be classified as good or bad bokeh.

* good bokeh softens the objects in front of the plane of focus (mae-boke).

*Out-of-focus background objects (ushiro-bokeh) lose detail but maintain their basic shapes and tones.

* One common fault noted in Japanese lens tests is ni-sen (two-line) bokeh: a tendency for out of focus objects to separate into two overlapping images.

* Some o-o-f highlights may be described as having enkan (ring) bokeh.

* O-o-f highlights having recognizable shapes may be described by the terms enkei (circular) bokeh, han-enjoh (semi-circular) bokeh, marumi ga aru (roundish), hosongai (long and narrow) or kometto-job

* When the lens is stopped down the blade structure of the iris may become apparent in the form of surudoi kado (sharp corners) in the ten bokeh (point bokeh)

Oren Grad’s article goes on to describe some vague and subjective bokeh terms;

* The overall look of the image may be described as sofuto (soft) or katai (hard)

* As the bokeh becomes less clean it may be described as hanzatsu (complex) or as kuzureru (breaking up or loosing shape).  

Also noted in the article are some, overall judgmental terms summing up a lens’ bokeh: kirei (pretty, beautiful, clean); sunao (gentle, well behaved);  yoi (good);  konomashii (nice, likeable); odayaka (gentle); shzen (natural) or even “kani no yoi bokeh " - bokeh that gives a good feeling; or when the reviewer is being critical, as the absence of such qualities.


In all the first two articles noted are the most informative discussion of bokeh, and certainly more complete an explanation than I have seen anywhere on the internet. END QUOTE

[grillo]

Mike Johnston just wrote this in his blog. Although it is not specifically about bokeh, I think it's relevant to this discussion:

 

"Alvin Langdon Coburn, if you don't know the name, born 1882, was a pictorialist enfant terrible (nevertheless dominated by his strong-willed mother) who did his best work before the First World War—he gained substantial fame and reputation while still in his teens and twenties. But speaking of sharpness, it was pretty amusing to see Coburn's strongly pictorialist photographic style in light of today's torrid discussions of resolution and sharpness. Everyone who was anyone in his day considered an impressionistic unsharpness to be the mark of artistic interpretation, and photographers across the Western world prized "diffusion." The public now, not knowing any better, thinks that old lenses from around the turn of the 20th century were not sharp because the technology simply hadn't progressed far enough. Not so. Lensmakers vied with each other to make lenses deliberately designed to be unsharp, first for portraits, then for everything. Photographers went to great lengths to seek out lenses with just the proper degree and type of blurriness. And, at clubs and salons and in photographic journals, they argued about just which lenses were the most perfectly unsharp. (I know it appears that I'm kidding, but I am not.) I recall reading about one photographer who kept the identity of his prized portrait lens a secret so his competitors would find it harder to mimic him."

 

http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2016/01/a-visit-to-the-treasure-vaults.html

[Theodor Heinrichsohn]

A Zeiss article may be of interest. "Schärfentiefe und Bokeh" Depth of Field and Bokeh by H.H. Nasse"

Carl Zeiss, 2010. Text in English.

Teddy

[pico]

Advertisement (gone after registration)

fault noted in Japanese lens tests is two-line) bokeh: a tendency for out of focus objects to separate into two overlapping images.

As shown here from 50mm Canon f/0.95

 

 

[120]

Mike Johnston just wrote this in his blog. Although it is not specifically about bokeh, I think it's relevant to this discussion:

 

"Alvin Langdon Coburn, if you don't know the name, born 1882, was a pictorialist enfant terrible (nevertheless dominated by his strong-willed mother) who did his best work before the First World War—he gained substantial fame and reputation while still in his teens and twenties. But speaking of sharpness, it was pretty amusing to see Coburn's strongly pictorialist photographic style in light of today's torrid discussions of resolution and sharpness. Everyone who was anyone in his day considered an impressionistic unsharpness to be the mark of artistic interpretation, and photographers across the Western world prized "diffusion." The public now, not knowing any better, thinks that old lenses from around the turn of the 20th century were not sharp because the technology simply hadn't progressed far enough. Not so. Lensmakers vied with each other to make lenses deliberately designed to be unsharp, first for portraits, then for everything. Photographers went to great lengths to seek out lenses with just the proper degree and type of blurriness. And, at clubs and salons and in photographic journals, they argued about just which lenses were the most perfectly unsharp. (I know it appears that I'm kidding, but I am not.) I recall reading about one photographer who kept the identity of his prized portrait lens a secret so his competitors would find it harder to mimic him."

 

http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2016/01/a-visit-to-the-treasure-vaults.html

 

Thanks! I think that is on-topic. Reading some original sources, these folks were definitely talking about blur quality. The brochure for the Smith lens in the link mentions "wooly" backgrounds. Dallmeyer calls his soft-focus lens "painter-like" (1895). Another talks about about the "painty effect" (1900). Another describes the effects of shooting backlighted leaves of trees (1915), the classic out of focus proving ground. When you think about what is going on in painting at the time and some of the photographers are also painters, it is maybe no surprise. Already in the 1850s the daguerreotype is too resolving for some "art" photographers--they are complaining about the high resolution look. The soft-focus lens is designed in the 1850s and appears in the 1860s.

[120]

A Zeiss article may be of interest. "Schärfentiefe und Bokeh" Depth of Field and Bokeh by H.H. Nasse"

Carl Zeiss, 2010. Text in English.

Teddy

 

 

Thanks, and a previous poster mentioned this one. It's on my reading list but I have never read it.

[zlatkob]

Mike Johnston just wrote this in his blog. Although it is not specifically about bokeh, I think it's relevant to this discussion:

 

"Alvin Langdon Coburn, if you don't know the name, born 1882, was a pictorialist enfant terrible (nevertheless dominated by his strong-willed mother) who did his best work before the First World War—he gained substantial fame and reputation while still in his teens and twenties. But speaking of sharpness, it was pretty amusing to see Coburn's strongly pictorialist photographic style in light of today's torrid discussions of resolution and sharpness. Everyone who was anyone in his day considered an impressionistic unsharpness to be the mark of artistic interpretation, and photographers across the Western world prized "diffusion." The public now, not knowing any better, thinks that old lenses from around the turn of the 20th century were not sharp because the technology simply hadn't progressed far enough. Not so. Lensmakers vied with each other to make lenses deliberately designed to be unsharp, first for portraits, then for everything. Photographers went to great lengths to seek out lenses with just the proper degree and type of blurriness. And, at clubs and salons and in photographic journals, they argued about just which lenses were the most perfectly unsharp. (I know it appears that I'm kidding, but I am not.) I recall reading about one photographer who kept the identity of his prized portrait lens a secret so his competitors would find it harder to mimic him."

 

http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2016/01/a-visit-to-the-treasure-vaults.html

 

I enjoyed this quote from the lens brochure, in which Coburn described why he liked his Smith lens so much:  "You have no more of what Bernard Shaw calls one of 'the infuriating academicisms of photography,' one plane of the picture sharp and all the others woolly and unnatural, a thing that no self-respecting human eye would ever see." 

[otho]

Some digressions about bokeh:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/explora/photography/tips-and-solutions/understanding-bokeh

[120]

Some digressions about bokeh:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/explora/photography/tips-and-solutions/understanding-bokeh

 

 

I think this is a reposted older article. The comments/advertising materials from the manufacturers are interesting. So far all of the technical articles including Nasse (Zeiss) and Merklinger (Photo Techniques) come from an advertising context.