BLADES & BOKEH VS SHARP GLASS

[tom_b._young]

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Could this be true - the more diaphragm blades in the lens the more

layers of bokeh? Which m-mount lens has the most blades? The other

question - does sharper glass make enriched bokeh or less pale?

[al_kaplan1]

Out of focus highlights assume the shape of the diaphragm opening. The more blades the rounder the opening. Round highlights seem less disturbing to the eye but it has nothing to do with the smoothness of the bokeh. That depends on the way the lens abberations are corrected more than anything. Sharp lenses can have harsher bokeh, but some softer lenses are simply horrid.

[tom_b._young]

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What brand has more blades - what brand is more sharp - that is for normal and semiwide in m lens. I do not know what m camera yet but leaning toward Ikon - when it comes out this month. I have two old Ikons and want to upgrade maybe and get sharp bokeh lenses.<BR>

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[ronald_moravec1]

Never counted the blades in my Summitar or Summarit, but they make a nice round hole with smooth oof areas.

[clayh]

Hi Frank.

[peter_evans4]

Hi, "A member of the www.photo.net community since August 21, 2005"; you're certainly pristine here!

[tom_b._young]

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My name is Tom - 36 - and I work for Safeway. I am going for my B.A. part time - I have two years left. My father gave me his Ikons - he went Olympus digital.

[djl251]

If you remove the blades entirely, does the lens still have bokeh?

[icuneko]

Master: "What's the sound of one blade clapping?

 

Disciple: "Sounds leic a bokeh to me."

[tom_b._young]

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There are a lot of m lenses from many companies. I want to know the ones with the most blades that are sharpest and with the best bokeh. That's all. I am almost sorry I posted the questions. I sign up and no one helps me. Are there other Leica forums?

[ronald_moravec1]

http://www.leica-camera.com/markt/forum/newsboard/index_e.html

 

Maybe these people will not be so rude.

 

I think some may have not understood the question fully so you get a smart a.. answer.

 

Give it one more try. Ignore the nuts.

[harvey_edelstein1]

Does the ghost of Frank, still haunt you?

[bill_e_gote]

It's the sharper blades that give the better bokeh. Hasselblad, Electro 35 - that top quality crowd - have two sets of blades to give light that extra chop that so appealing to connoysers. Sharper glass has a paling effect only if you cut yourself deeply with it.

[gabrielma]

Harvey: I thought the same thing. He will not give up.

[gabrielma]

No pun.

[melvin_bressler1]

Hi Tom:

 

Don't give up on us, and don't take any answers personally.

 

Note what Al said. Generally the number of blades will have a minimal effect

on the out of focus areas, except when stopped down several stops. Wide

open, the number of blades has little or no effect at all.

 

Keep shooting, and make up your own mind.

 

Happy snaps.

[icuneko]

<...more layers of bokeh?> What do you mean by "more layers?" This is

unclear?

 

<...does sharper glass make enriched bokeh or less pale?> According to E. Puts, the new Leica APO and ASPH lenses with better corrected abberations have harsher bokeh as the circles of confusion go from sharp to unsharp, i.e. out of focus (OOF), faster than older lesser corrected lenses. If this is Greek to you, check his webpage (http://www.imx.nl/); it's got tons of info. Or use a search engine

for "bokeh."

 

And what do you mean by "less pale?"

[tom_b._young]

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Thank you Ronald for your link - I joined and I will be asking my questions there - this is a rude unmoderated forum.

[fran_ois_courtois]

I will try and answer your question, and simply give you my personal opinion based on my own - limited - experience <p>I am not convinced that the number of blades will automatically guarantee great bokeh. Old Leitz lenses from the seventies, sixties, and before, usually have more blades, 11 or 12, and these blades have a complex curved shape. These lenses usually have nice bokeh but are not necessarily the sharpest lenses around, 'though I find them great for b&w, colors are not as pure as recent asph. designs for slides<p>The recent c/v 21/4 color skopar also has 12 blades, but out of focus areas are not so easy to obtain (see some pictures in my gallery).<p>The 'cron 35 v4 is known as the king of bokeh, but I think it is a matter of taste as I own the 'cron 35 asph. and find the bokeh to be even better.<p> The current 'cron 50 has only 5 or 6 blades but the oof areas are very smooth and creamy, and this lens is one of the sharpest 50s ever made<p>The cheap Nokton 50/1.5 has also a good reputation for excellent bokeh, and the lens is pretty sharp, but I personnally never used it, just seen pictures on the web<p>I have not yet been convinced with the bokeh of the Nokton 40, but again, i probably have not seen enough pictures taken with this lens to judge, because this matter is very subject dependent, aperture dependent,and also subjective.<p>Some people say bokeh improves when the lens is stopped down one aperture ... which goes against the theory of the blades playing a role, because when a lens is closed one stop, this is precisely the moment where the blades show the most rogh edges ...<p>Many people believe bokeh is a result of a lack of correction of achromatic aberration, so nicer on old designs ... go figure out ... <p>Kind Regards - Francois

[paul t]

Hi Tom, apologies for the apparent rudeness, which was all started by some

weirdo timewaster who keeps registering with a new name and asking the

same questions again and again. Yours looked a little like one of his - not

because it was a dumb question... but some people are a little cynical about

bokeh, because some photographers are more obsessed with bokeh than

what the photos themselves look like. <p>

As Al pointed out, Bokeh is defined more by things like spherical aberrations

than the shape of the diaphragm blades. Most rangefinder lenses have a lot

of blades; my Nikkor 85/1.4 SLR lens has only 9, which means that point light

sources have nine-side (nonogonal?) highlights, although I think the out-of-

focus areas look great. <p>

There's a pretty good discussion of bokeh and diaphragm blades

<a href="http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/bokeh.htm">here</a>. The imx.nl

site, run by a guy called Erwin Putts, has a lot of tests of Leica and other

lenses (you'll find he's a real Leica fan). There's a lot of debate as to whether

classic Zeiss Sonnar designs have better boken than Summicrons, and

recently Karen Nakamura, who runs a photo blog which I'm sure you can

Google, announced that she'd renounced her Summicron 35/2 V4, which has

reputedly the best bokeh of any Leica lens, for a Zeiss Biogon 35/2, whose

bokeh she found even smoother. As bokeh is so subjective, this is a debate

that will run and run. However, there's a good discussion of how different

lenses 'draw', by Sean Reid, using a wide variety of lenses on the RD-1, over

at the

<a href="http://luminous-landscape.com/reviews/lenses/

fastlensreview.shtml">luminous landscape site</a>

<p>

[alvin_hear]

<p><a href="http://members.aol.com/dcolucci/bokeh.htm">Bokeh Central</a>

[christian hilmersen www.]

The hexanon 50 f2 is a real bokeh winner - best bokeh I have ever seen. (10 blades). The hasselblad planar 80 2.8 has a much stranger bokeh, ranging from excellent to the worst I have ever seen....it has 5 blades. So, I would say that what is good bokeh is dependent on the situation. The hexanon bokeh is very natural, but isn't as artistically pleasing as the hasselblad at its most pleasing, but never as bad either. 5 blades is never good - the hassie can show terrible pentagons given the right situation.

[al_kaplan1]

Up until a few years ago the very word "bokeh" itself didn't exist in the English language. It was a poorly defined concept that people were aware of but didn't seem so obsessed about as they are now. If you have well lit interesting subjects, good compostition, and manage to capture a "decisive moment" bokeh becomes a very minor consideration. And if you have an interesting Japanese word everybody wants to talk about it.

[peter_evans4]

<p>The word "bokeh" seems to be so spelled to prevent anglophones from pronouncing it to rhyme with "soak" and "bloke". There's no other reason for the "h": in Japanese, the "ke" is pronounced like the "cke" in English "pocket". It was introduced to English by John Kennerdell, who is still being misquoted on it. (People email him with questions, he answers these, he's then "quoted" as saying something else.) He seems to regret ever having mentioned it, and incidentally uses a small and cheap digital camera for almost everything these days. In Japanese, <em>boke</em> means fuzziness (optical, caused by senility, whatever); what anglophone obsessives call "bokeh" is more often <em>boke-aji</em>.</p>

[djl251]

Tom, I was not trying to be flip in my response. I only point out that the BOKEH is most apparent when the blades play NO role in the light transmission. So to attribute the quality of BOKEH to the blades rather than the glass seems to be a little crazy to me.

 

Hey I have an old polaroid camera that has a disk with different sized circular holes in it. You dial up the one you want. So this aperture has only ONE blade but perfectly round holes in it. I don't think it's BOKEH is remarkable.

 

If you want to know about the bokeh of a prticular lens - best to shoot with it.