Why shoot wide-open?

[M Street Photographer]

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vor 9 Stunden schrieb hdmesa:

Street at f/1. Forces the viewer to look where you were focusing.

CV 50 f/1

Ansel Adams achieved the effect by adding a vignette very often. Which also has the advantage of keeping the view in the picture.

vor 2 Stunden schrieb LocalHero1953:

... One common solution is to shoot in B&W, eliminating the compositional problems caused by colour that can work in opposition to graphic structure (e.g. a red pair of trousers or skirt, drawing the eye away from a face).* Another solution is to imitate the painter and choose what goes in the photo: this is the studio portrait, or a still life....

When asked why he takes color photos, Joel Meyerowitz once said: The sky is blue, the sun is yellow, the trees are green, why should I shoot in B&W?

Of course, color photography is more difficult when there are disturbing color elements (neon colors) that distract from the actual punctum. Color photography also requires, among other things, knowledge of complementary colors and their effects in order to create a "better" picture.

In my opinion, photos are often shown on forums, max. open f1, f1.2, because the lens is new. The strength of these lenses does not lie there, even if some are different, better than comparable ones. The mistake that is now being made, regardless of the motif and artistic reasons, is that they now think they have to photograph everything openly.

There may be low light situations where it is appropriate, there may be artistic reasons that speak in favor of photographing as openly as possible, but many people think that they always have to photograph with 0.95, 1.0, 1.2, 1.4, especially with portraits and headshots, but apart from the fewest exceptions, it is also often artistically wrong, the photos look unnatural, the gradients are extreme, so that the iris is sharp, the lids are softer and from then on you can no longer see anything of the face, ears, hair .
It may be that it is also a question of the quality of an objective, a Leica 50 0.95 now depicts things differently / better than a TT Artisan and that across the entire range of apertures.

[evikne]

9 hours ago, hdmesa said:

Street at f/1. Forces the viewer to look where you were focusing.

CV 50 f/1

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At these distances, I don't think the difference between sharp and unsharp is big enough to fully create the desired effect (moving the viewer's eye towards what you were focusing on), even at f/1. But at shorter distances, selective focus is a very effective technique.

[pippy]

15 hours ago, stray cat said:

The cover photo of his "5 Decades" book is a great example (click to enlarge it): https://www.amazon.com/William-Albert-Allard-Five-Decades/dp/1426206372

Thanks for that, Phil. The only volume I know by W.A. Allard is his book on Paris. I really should have a look at more of his stuff.

Oddly enough the cover of '5 Decades' brought up a particularly strong memory. Back in 1985 for one of my class 'Portrait' assignments I photographed a female friend. For the image I had draped a fine, largely translucent and patterned (with a subtle floral motif) black silk scarf over her head and down over her face. The pic was shot on 5"x4" with (IIRC) shallow D-o-F. Two weeks later I recieved, in the post, a card from her. The cover shot was the famous (as I now know!) photograph of Gloria Swanson by Edward Steichen. Inside my pal had written;

"If you are going to plagiarise someone then you may as well plagiarise the best!...XXX"

In all honesty I had never seen the image before but I can see why she might have thought that to be unlikely. Here is a link to the Steichen image;

https://assets.catawiki.nl/assets/2017/2/22/a/d/c/adcf2596-f8e5-11e6-8c74-f577c4493e72.jpg

I believe I still have a print of my own snap somewhere. AFAICR it's not all that similar apart from the scarf being used as a veil. I believe I'm correct in saying that I had focussed on my model's eyes whereas Steichen has focussed on the material but if I find the print - or even the negative - I'll try to make a copy and post it here just for the fun of it.

Philip.

 

Edited January 15, 2023 by pippy

[hdmesa]

3 hours ago, evikne said:

At these distances, I don't think the difference between sharp and unsharp is big enough to fully create the desired effect (moving the viewer's eye towards what you were focusing on), even at f/1. But at shorter distances, selective focus is a very effective technique.

It’s definitely subtle, and unless you click though to the higher res, you for sure won’t see it since these inline previews are soft, and the point of focus looks weak.

[rsolomon]

I only know of two reasons….

need to - tbd by you

want to - tbd by you 

go try it, understand it, train on it and the add it to your toolbox 

[hepcat]

15 hours ago, pippy said:

Yes; clearly I understand that many famous images have been shot with shallow D-o-F. Hopefully that goes without saying?

What I'm particularly interested to discover is whether certain images which we all know and love were deliberately shot at Max. Ap. and have been described as such by the photographer(s) concerned. As per the title of the thread I'm not really asking about anything shot at any aperture but wide-open.

Hope that clarifies matters? Thanks in advance!

Philip.

EDIT : just to make things perfectly clear; I really love using Max. Ap. when the image benefits from that approach and, as it happens, of the latest three images I've posted in the Forum one was shot using a 90mm Summicron wide-open (f2); one was shot on a 50mm f2 Planar wide-open and the 3rd was shot on a 50mm f1.5 Summarit at f2 but only because I was curious to compare how the Planar and Summarit performed at the same aperture.

I have also undertaken, last year, a light-hearted 'One lens; One aperture' challenge set by a forumite and selected my 50mm f1.5 Summarit used at f1.5 as my choice.

I'm not after a bun-fight; I'm just interested to know whether there were/are world-famous snappers who have proclaimed their adherence to a 'Shoot Wide-Open' ethos in comparison to the 'Shoot Fully Stopped-Down' approach of Group f64.

This is an interesting question, framed with a 21st Century aesthetic.   Other responses have discussed color vs. b&w as well.  The answer to your question lies primarily not in aesthetics, but history and technological development.    The very idea of "bokeh" as an aesthetic choice is only about twenty-five years old.   The word itself was only added to the dictionary in 2017.  It is a relatively new concept in photography and one that wasn't seriously considered at all in the 19th and most of the 20th century.

Going back to the early 20th Century work, much of it was done on 4x5 and 6x6 (and variants).   35mm was considered "miniature format" and wasn't much used for serious professional work until the 1990s.  Of course there were millions of frames shot with 35mm, don't misunderstand... but because films' quality was relatively poor, most work shot for reproduction or commercial work was done on medium or large format.   It wasn't really until more modern films appeared in the early 1990s, along with the Canon EOS and Nikon F4 that 35mm began to replace medium format for a lot of pro work. 

Alluding the the f/64 group recalls the backlash from Pictorialism to realism and modernism.  Same equipment, different philosophies; both important historically in understanding the period images were made in and why they look the way they do.  

With all of that in mind, large aperture lenses in the first half of the 20th Century were pretty much limited to f/1.4 for we mortals.  There were a few f/1.2 lenses, and of course the Canon f/0.95 but they were made of unobtanium and really weren't considered for serious use by most photographers.   In 1993 I bought a Canon 50mm EF f/1.0 because someone had it for sale and I thought it'd be awesome.  I had it about a year and used it twice.  It was two-and-a-half pounds... about a kilo and was HUGE.  I sold it for an f/1.4 which suited my work much better, size and weight wise.

Anyway to the point, until the 1990s, f/2 was "max aperture" for just about every photographer in the world, and aperture was only important insofar as you had adequate DOF and proper exposure.   Most photographers avoided shallow DOF because it commonly lead to out-of-focus images.   When you shot wide-open, it was because you were shooting black cats in coal bins at night (figuratively, of course) and those folks who did that understood how critical the focus was and that a potentially underexposed, blurred image of a significant event was better than no image at all. 

To summarize, it's only been the past twenty or so years that "bokeh" and depth-of-field have been discussed by photographers as aesthetic choices rather than merely a tool to work in dim light with slow films (with the advent of variable ISO sensor choices.)   I doubt there will be much literature quoting "the greats" discussing what they would have considered a basic, and usually less desirable, exposure tool.

[pippy]

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1 minute ago, rsolomon said:

I only know of two reasons….

need to - tbd by you

want to - tbd by you 

go try it, understand it, train on it and the add it to your toolbox 

Yes; that's all very well and is understood completely and as I have already said a few times in this thread; I do shoot wide-open. Believe me; I understand the concept very well.

I can see that you have missed the point of the thread. The question asked in the OP (as opposed to the thread title) was;

"...how many of the genuinely 'Great' photographs taken over the last 190 years have been captured when the lenses were set wide-open?".

Philip.

[Jeff S]

9 minutes ago, hepcat said:

This is an interesting question, framed with a 21st Century aesthetic.   Other responses have discussed color vs. b&w as well.  The answer to your question lies primarily not in aesthetics, but history and technological development.    The very idea of "bokeh" as an aesthetic choice is only about twenty-five years old.   The word itself was only added to the dictionary in 2017.  It is a relatively new concept in photography and one that wasn't seriously considered at all in the 19th and most of the 20th century.

Going back to the early 20th Century work, much of it was done on 4x5 and 6x6 (and variants).   35mm was considered "miniature format" and wasn't much used for serious professional work until the 1990s.  Of course there were millions of frames shot with 35mm, don't misunderstand... but because films' quality was relatively poor, most work shot for reproduction or commercial work was done on medium or large format.   It wasn't really until more modern films appeared in the early 1990s, along with the Canon EOS and Nikon F4 that 35mm began to replace medium format for a lot of pro work. 

Alluding the the f/64 group recalls the backlash from Pictorialism to realism and modernism.  Same equipment, different philosophies; both important historically in understanding the period images were made in and why they look the way they do.  

With all of that in mind, large aperture lenses in the first half of the 20th Century were pretty much limited to f/1.4 for we mortals.  There were a few f/1.2 lenses, and of course the Canon f/0.95 but they were made of unobtanium and really weren't considered for serious use by most photographers.   In 1993 I bought a Canon 50mm EF f/1.0 because someone had it for sale and I thought it'd be awesome.  I had it about a year and used it twice.  It was two-and-a-half pounds... about a kilo and was HUGE.  I sold it for an f/1.4 which suited my work much better, size and weight wise.

Anyway to the point, until the 1990s, f/2 was "max aperture" for just about every photographer in the world, and aperture was only important insofar as you had adequate DOF and proper exposure.   Most photographers avoided shallow DOF because it commonly lead to out-of-focus images.   When you shot wide-open, it was because you were shooting black cats in coal bins at night (figuratively, of course) and those folks who did that understood how critical the focus was and that a potentially underexposed, blurred image of a significant event was better than no image at all. 

To summarize, it's only been the past twenty or so years that "bokeh" and depth-of-field have been discussed by photographers as aesthetic choices rather than merely a tool to work in dim light with slow films (with the advent of variable ISO sensor choices.)   I doubt there will be much literature quoting "the greats" discussing what they would have considered a basic, and usually less desirable, exposure tool.

As Kennerdell notes in this article detailing the evolution of the term ‘bokeh,’ the concept of paying attention to defocused areas of an image was hardly new.

https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2017/04/20-years-ago-this-month-what-is-bokeh.html
 

Today’s obsession, however, is another matter.

Jeff

[hepcat]

4 minutes ago, Jeff S said:

Today’s obsession, however, is another matter.

Jeff

Exactly.

[Siriusone59]

32 minutes ago, pippy said:

I can see that you have missed the point of the thread. The question asked in the OP (as opposed to the thread title) was;

"...how many of the genuinely 'Great' photographs taken over the last 190 years have been captured when the lenses were set wide-open?".

Philip.

42 😉

[hepcat]

10 minutes ago, Siriusone59 said:

42 😉

Of course.  The Mice knew the answer.

[willeica]

16 hours ago, pippy said:

Any particular lens, as I'm sure we all appreciate, will show its fullest 'character' when used at max. aperture and from time to time I've very much enjoyed shooting stuff shot in this manner as, I suspect, have we all. But here's the thing; famously 'Group f64' produced some astonishing, ground-breaking, images using minimum apertures but how many of the genuinely 'Great' photographs taken over the last 190 years have been captured when the lenses were set wide-open? Off-hand, so help me, I can't think of one.

 

'Greatness' is in the eye of the beholder, not in the eye of the lens, of course, Philip. I wonder would I get kicked out of the Group f64 for using this washer stop marked f 72? Made in the 1860s or 70s, but marked much later. The lens itself gave about f14.4 'wide open'.

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7 hours ago, LocalHero1953 said:

*** Constable and Canaletto are examples of painters who used their lenses stopped down, with every element in their paintings shown in detail, but the composition working perfectly as whole.

Canaletto invented Photoshop, course, with his 'post' changes. He had an amazing control of perspective. I recall being asked by a guide at a museum somewhere (London or Russia) to walk past a Canaletto painting to observe the perspective changes on a Canaletto painting as we walked by. They were always 'correct' of course. He often changed what he saw in and drew from his camera obscura - photo below courtesy of Museum Correr, Venice

I don't know if he could stop down his lens, but this takes us back over the 190 years limit anyway.

There are a lot of posts online showing ' nice bokeh' from lenses as if that made photographs great. I do know a few photographers who can create wonderful photos shooting wide open, but I have seen thousands of photographers, myself included, who cannot. 

Great lenses of any era could be used to take great photos, but many times great photos were made with what might be called 'poor' lenses.  This is heresy on a gear forum, of course.

William 

 

[Jeff S]

17 minutes ago, willeica said:

'Greatness' is in the eye of the beholder, not in the eye of the lens, of course, Philip. I wonder would I get kicked out of the Group f64 for using this washer stop marked f 72? Made in the 1860s or 70s, but marked much later. The lens itself gave about f14.4 'wide open'.

Welcome, dear visitor! As registered member you'd see an image here…

Simply register for free here – We are always happy to welcome new members!

 

Canaletto invented Photoshop, course, with his 'post' changes. He had an amazing control of perspective. I recall being asked by a guide at a museum somewhere (London or Russia) to walk past a Canaletto painting to observe the perspective changes on a Canaletto painting as we walked by. They were always 'correct' of course. He often changed what he saw in and drew from his camera obscura - photo below courtesy of Museum Correr, Venice

I don't know if he could stop down his lens, but this takes us back over the 190 years limit anyway.

There are a lot of posts online showing ' nice bokeh' from lenses as if that made photographs great. I do know a few photographers who can create wonderful photos shooting wide open, but I have seen thousands of photographers, myself included, who cannot. 

Great lenses of any era could be used to take great photos, but many times great photos were made with what might be called 'poor' lenses.  This is heresy on a gear forum, of course.

William 

 

As you might know, Edward Weston made his own f-stops and eventually decided to make an f/240 to shoot his iconic Pepper #30 ( with an exposure over 4 hours) with his view camera.

https://petapixel.com/2017/08/15/famous-pepper-photo-edward-weston-4hr-exposure-f240/

Some do a lot with ‘primitive’ methods/gear; others struggle using the best.

Jeff

[pippy]

1 hour ago, hepcat said:

This is an interesting question, framed with a 21st Century aesthetic.   Other responses have discussed color vs. b&w as well.  The answer to your question lies primarily not in aesthetics, but history and technological development.    The very idea of "bokeh" as an aesthetic choice is only about twenty-five years old.   The word itself was only added to the dictionary in 2017.  It is a relatively new concept in photography and one that wasn't seriously considered at all in the 19th and most of the 20th century.

Going back to the early 20th Century work, much of it was done on 4x5 and 6x6 (and variants).   35mm was considered "miniature format" and wasn't much used for serious professional work until the 1990s.  Of course there were millions of frames shot with 35mm, don't misunderstand... but because films' quality was relatively poor, most work shot for reproduction or commercial work was done on medium or large format.   It wasn't really until more modern films appeared in the early 1990s, along with the Canon EOS and Nikon F4 that 35mm began to replace medium format for a lot of pro work. 

Alluding the the f/64 group recalls the backlash from Pictorialism to realism and modernism.  Same equipment, different philosophies; both important historically in understanding the period images were made in and why they look the way they do.  

With all of that in mind, large aperture lenses in the first half of the 20th Century were pretty much limited to f/1.4 for we mortals.  There were a few f/1.2 lenses, and of course the Canon f/0.95 but they were made of unobtanium and really weren't considered for serious use by most photographers.   In 1993 I bought a Canon 50mm EF f/1.0 because someone had it for sale and I thought it'd be awesome.  I had it about a year and used it twice.  It was two-and-a-half pounds... about a kilo and was HUGE.  I sold it for an f/1.4 which suited my work much better, size and weight wise.

Anyway to the point, until the 1990s, f/2 was "max aperture" for just about every photographer in the world, and aperture was only important insofar as you had adequate DOF and proper exposure.   Most photographers avoided shallow DOF because it commonly lead to out-of-focus images.   When you shot wide-open, it was because you were shooting black cats in coal bins at night (figuratively, of course) and those folks who did that understood how critical the focus was and that a potentially underexposed, blurred image of a significant event was better than no image at all. 

To summarize, it's only been the past twenty or so years that "bokeh" and depth-of-field have been discussed by photographers as aesthetic choices rather than merely a tool to work in dim light with slow films (with the advent of variable ISO sensor choices.)   I doubt there will be much literature quoting "the greats" discussing what they would have considered a basic, and usually less desirable, exposure tool.

Thank you for your very thoughtful and interesting answer, Hepcat. There's much in there which I'd love to discuss at length but it's not yet 6 o'clock and the wine is still breathing...

 A few random thoughts, though, if I may?

Some of my favourite portraitists are those which were taken in the mid-late 19th Century. By virtue of the constraints imposed upon the photographers by the equipment and slow emulsions of the time many images had to be shot with lens apertures wider than would become the norm just a couple of decades later as lenses became 'faster' and as emulsion sensitivity increased.

On the subject of fast 'standard' lenses; when I was a student the only lenses I could afford were at the slower end of the market. My M-mount Leitz lenses were a 35mm f3.5 Summaron and a 50mm f2.8 Elmar. Nikkors were 28 f3.5 / 35 f2.8 / 50 f2 / 85 f1.8(!) / 105 f2.5. Shortly after I had gained employment I treated myself to a 55mm f1.2 Nikkor and when used wide-open I thought that it was rubbish! Yesterday's Rubbish, of course, is Today's Wunderkind.

I think there is much in what you say regarding how the whole concept of 'Boke' is too recent for it to have much of an effect yet. Perhaps a full understanding of the impact of very fast lenses being used at Max. Ap. in Photography will not be known until many years - if not decades - in the future.

Philip.

[pippy]

33 minutes ago, willeica said:

'Greatness' is in the eye of the beholder, not in the eye of the lens, of course, Philip. I wonder would I get kicked out of the Group f64 for using this washer stop marked f 72?...

When I typed 'Great', William, I put it in inverted commas and both italicised and capitalised the 'G' to signify that it was not one's own personal opinion based on individual aesthetics which was important in the matter of it's 'Greatness' but the place such an image occupies in the popular perception of Photography as a whole. Examples of 'Great' images would include the likes of Karsh's portrait of Churchill; HCB's Puddle-Jumper and so on.

I strongly doubt whether anyone would ever question that these images deserve the accolade 'Great' regardless of whether the viewers actually liked the images themselves.

As far as the f72 stop is concerned; I'm sure they would be delighted to have a member with such a small aperture stop to play with!

Philip.

Edited January 15, 2023 by pippy

[oldwino]

I’d be willing to bet a pint or two that most of Robert Frank’s The Americans was shot wide open or close to it. In his case out of necessity, given film speeds and the conditions he was shooting in. Plus, he wasn’t worried about “nailing focus” too much. He just wanted the shot. 
The differences in lenses, whether old film era designs or modern Karbe creations, are to be found at wider apertures. Pretty much all lenses start to look the same when stopped down a bit (f4-5.6), so when you’ve spent a ton of money on that f0.95 Besonderlux, you want to see where your money goes. 

[oldwino]

12 minutes ago, pippy said:

Shortly after I had gained employment I treated myself to a 55mm f1.2 Nikkor and when used wide-open I thought that it was rubbish! Yesterday's Rubbish, of course, is Today's Wunderkind.

Philip.

My copy of the 55/1.2 is wonderful at f1.4 and at f2.8. Wide open…well, let’s say it was an ambitious design decision, that extra 1/2 stop. 

[pippy]

2 hours ago, pippy said:

...Oddly enough the cover of '5 Decades' brought up a particularly strong memory. Back in 1985 for one of my class 'Portrait' assignments I photographed a female friend...

...Here is a link to the Steichen image;

https://assets.catawiki.nl/assets/2017/2/22/a/d/c/adcf2596-f8e5-11e6-8c74-f577c4493e72.jpg

I believe I still have a print of my own snap somewhere. AFAICR it's not all that similar apart from the scarf being used as a veil. I believe I'm correct in saying that I had focussed on my model's eyes whereas Steichen has focussed on the material but if I find the print - or even the negative - I'll try to make a copy and post it here just for the fun of it...

Just to tie-up this loose-end once and for all...

Here is a copy of one print which I made at the time and was what I chose to be the final crop;

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Nothing like the Steichen shot at all.

Unfortunately......

Philip.

[hepcat]

15 minutes ago, pippy said:

Thank you for your very thoughtful and interesting answer, Hepcat. There's much in there which I'd love to discuss at length but it's not yet 6 o'clock and the wine is still breathing...

 A few random thoughts, though, if I may?

Some of my favourite portraitists are those which were taken in the mid-late 19th Century. By virtue of the constraints imposed upon the photographers by the equipment and slow emulsions of the time many images had to be shot with lens apertures wider than would become the norm just a couple of decades later as lenses became 'faster' and as emulsion sensitivity increased.

On the subject of fast 'standard' lenses; when I was a student the only lenses I could afford were at the slower end of the market. My M-mount Leitz lenses were a 35mm f3.5 Summaron and a 50mm f2.8 Elmar. Nikkors were 28 f3.5 / 35 f2.8 / 50 f2 / 85 f1.8(!) / 105 f2.5. Shortly after I had gained employment I treated myself to a 55mm f1.2 Nikkor and when used wide-open I thought that it was rubbish! Yesterday's Rubbish, of course, is Today's Wunderkind.

I think there is much in what you say regarding how the whole concept of 'Boke' is too recent for it to have much of an effect yet. Perhaps a full understanding of the impact of very fast lenses being used at Max. Ap. in Photography will not be known until many years - if not decades - in the future.

Philip.

On the subject of slow lenses and slower emulsions... and the need to shoot "wide open," someone earlier mentioned Saul Leiter's "In My Room."  I also have the book, and IIRC much of what he shot was with a Rolleiflex f/3.5, a Leica of some sort, or early on an Argus C3.  Being a contemporary of Leiter's later years in the early '70s, and using gear from the '50s myself during that time (because all I could afford was a four-lens Canon IIF outfit,)  I suspect that his images had less to do with the look of the "out of focus" areas and more to do with the necessity of using large apertures and slow shutter speeds just getting an image on an ISO 50 emulsion.  Many of Leiter's photos are slightly out of focus either because of slow shutter speed, or just slightly missing focus on a dark subject in a dimly lit room.  In many cases from that era, I believe that the aesthetic was a result of the necessities of exposure.

What I find interesting is the effect the pursuit of "bokeh" has today; the wide world of large aperture lenses all competing for that magic dollar, and those photographers who go through lenses like discarded disposable contact lenses in search of just the "right" look.   I think, particularly in places like gear-centric forums, those discussions widely overshadow discussions about photographs and what makes them "great."

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[raizans]

Using a lens wide open became a trend in the digital era because large sensors and shallow depth-of-field became signs of status. It was not driven by artistic reasons, and I have yet to see much contemporary work (barring modern wet plate photography) use very shallow depth-of-field in a creatively exciting way. Most lenses in the 28mm to 50mm equivalent range produce harsh, bright ring bokeh at wide apertures, leading to jangly, sometimes swirly, distracting backgrounds. Billions of photographs would have looked a little nicer (IMO!) if people had stopped the lens down two or three stops. This is all the more regrettable since digital has less noise, and it's more practical to raise the ISO and still permit using smaller apertures in low light. The misconception that shallow depth-of-field by itself will isolate the subject, without considering perspective and foreground/background relationships, leads to lazy, ineffective composition. Our descendants will recognize photographs from this period by noticing the cluttered, anxiety-coated backgrounds. I despair for this lost generation. 😂😭

Edited January 15, 2023 by raizans