bokeh?

[rose_duclos]

Ok, I'm attempting to understand Bokeh - the idea of having a circle on a

picture that's in focus? How does one do it, intentionally?

 

I have pictures with parts out of focus, but I thought the out of focus stuff

was bad, not good...

[mawz]

Bokeh is merely the quality of the out of focus highlights. Smooth is good, hard is bad.

[william-porter]

My advice: Don't worry about bokeh. Once you've bought the lens, there's not a lot you can do about it.

 

That said, bokeh is used to refer to the attractiveness of the out-of-focus parts of a photo. I don't understand the optics of it very well, but different lenses cause the light in the out of focus (or less well-focused) parts of a photo to be refracted in different ways, sometimes producing little abstract patterns like circles or diamonds. What constitutes good bokeh has always seemed to me pretty subjective. I confess that there are some photos where the out of focus part of the photo is distractingly ugly. But it doesn't seem to me to be a big deal most of the time.

 

You don't create good or bad bokeh intentionally. It's a property of the lens's optics. But you can intentionally produce out of focus parts of the photo, most obviously by shooting with a wide aperture. For example, try this. Get your spouse or friend or child or dog to stand about eight or ten feet from you, in good light. Put something nice into the background, like trees, or flowers, and make sure that the background is another 8-10 feet behind the subject. Open the lens to its widest aperture: f/2.8 or f/3.5 or whatever you've got, then get the shutter speed right, and shoot the photo. Put it on your computer and take a look. With a big aperture like that, depth of field should be shallow, meaning that the subject should be in focus, but the background will not be. This is commonly done in portrait photography to draw the viewer's attention to the subject's face.

 

No, there's nothing wrong with having parts of the photo out of focus, so long as their note the parts of the photo that you intended to be in focus. Leaving aside deliberately unconventional artistic approaches, normally, you want a subject's face to be in focus, but you may or may not care about what's behind the subject. The attached photo was taken at a swim meet last weekend. The little girl was hanging around bored while her big sister swam. I wanted to focus on her, and detach her from the swim meet coordinators in the background, so I made sure the aperture was as wide as possible (f/2.8) and took the shot. By the way, I don't even notice the bokeh in this shot. I guess I'm just not that into bokeh.<div></div>

[william-porter]

Aaarfph. In my post, "...so long as their note the parts...." should be "so long as they're not the parts..."

 

My personal editor is out sick today. ;-)

[rose_duclos]

I don't take people pictures, at least not intentionally. I like rocks, trees, flowers, fences, old buildings, animals galore - but there's to much effort to taking people pictures. At some point you have to show the pictures and take ownership for how bad they are - when people are involved.

[william-porter]

Rose,

 

By the way, there are three problems with the photo you posted. Well four. First, it was too big. If you size down to no more than 510 pixels per side, the photo will appear inline here, which is nicer.

 

Now to the real points.

 

First, you don't just have some part of the photo out of focus -- you also have motion blur. The hand in the photo isn't out of focus, it's blurred, probably because it was moving as you shot. If the CAMERA had been moving, I'd expect the entire photo to be out of focus, because the rocks were presumably sitting pretty still. Solution here would have been a faster shutter. The photo was taken apparently at 1/180th sec which I would expect to be fast enough for this shot, but I guess not.

 

Second, you're focusing pretty close on this subject -- and there are blades of grass in front of the rocks. These blades of grass can confuse your camera's auto-focus mechanism. As it happens, they don't seem to have caused a problem, as the rock in the middle of the photo looks reasonably well focused to me. But it's something to consider. I'd focus something like this manually.

 

Third, your f/5.6 aperture is not narrow enough to get everything in this shot into good focus, in other words, not narrow enough to get good depth of field here. You were shooting at 120mm and apparently fairly close to your subject. Camera-to-subject distance also affects depth of field but is a bit harder to understand than using the aperture to control depth of field. To get this whole photo into decent focus, you could have upped the ISO to, say, 400, and stopped the aperture down a bit to f/11. How do I figure this? Well, I start by thinking about depth of field here. For deep depth of field, I usually think f/11 or thereabouts. But if your focal length is 120mm, you need to keep the shutter speed to something reasonably fast in order to avoid the effects of camera shake, so that means you keep the shutter speed at 1/150th sec or faster. And THAT means you've got to up the ISO, because that is the only place left to give. Well, or use flash....

[rose_duclos]

William,

Thank you for the advice. I was shooting just about everything that day in either "P" or "green" because I was to rushed to think about continuing to deal with menus - so the camera was doing all the work. (first weekend outside with it). I just aimed and clicked.

 

The 'big' question is - how does one size down?

[william-porter]

Rose,

 

This is a K10D? (Has a green button, apparently.) You can use P mode as "hypermanual", in other words, move one of the e-dials and the other setting will be adjusted for you automatically. So you can move the aperture from whatever the camera offers you to, say, f/8 or higher and you should still get a good exposure.

 

You asked: "The 'big' question is - how does one size down?"

 

Not sure I understand the question. Oh, I think I know what you mean. How do you change your photo from its original dimensions to something under 510 pixels per side? Well, you've got some photo editing software, I presume, whether it's the Pentax Lab app or something else. In most of the programs I have, there is either an export or save as command that allows you to export/save a copy of a photo, and when you use that command, you're given the chance to restrict the dimensions. Just tell the program to limit the size of the output file to 510 pixels horizontally and vertically (probably two different settings) and you should be good. I save these exports to my desktop, upload them here and then delete 'em immediately from my desktop.

[rose_duclos]

Ok, I will play with the "hypermanual" method you described and see what I can do with it. I only got the 1.3 firmware upgrade last night - so it should help with using those wheel-thingies.

 

the pictures I posted are from what I emailed to myself (at work). The pentax lab software is at home, and I still haven't made any sense out of it. From my attempts to open it thus far, it didn't seem to read any of the pictures I'd taken. It may just mean that I'm not using it correctly yet. (most likely this is the case. I'm not very technical - in case you questioned this... ) :)

 

-Rose

[mountainvisions]

Bokeh is the appearance of the out of focus areas of a scene. Generally it's more refered to as a characteristic of a lens but it's never the less the out of focus area of the lens created by the aperture blades.

<P>

Selectively using DOF (depth of field) to remove distractions is a way to isolate your subject.

<P>

However, some people go overboard with this and shoot "wide open" which is using a small aperture (apertures are fractions 1/1.4 1/2.0 1/2.8 so smaller #'s are actually larger openings) all the time to get bokeh.

<P>

Definitely the decision to expand or restrict DOF is both an artistic and a technical one.

<P>

Sometimes blurring out a background in a landscape is a good thing. I've scene some of Hin's photos using this technique with some grasses that worked really well.

<P>

But other times (more often than not) you want a landscape to have a sharp DOF from front to back. the reason is unless DOF is purposeful, such as Hins photograph I mentioned. It lends the hole image to being soft.

<P>

People wonder why some peoples images look so sharp, the reality is they aren't sharper, they just used better control of DOF to either keep the entire scene equally sharp, or isolate the subject. In between use tends to leave the viewer with an appearance of softness or no focal point.

<P>

Example of isolating with a large aperture to blur out the distracting background...

<P>

<a title="Dumb and Dumber" href=" ><img src="http://static.flickr.com/1365/559529240_e4e899c220_d.jpg" border="0"/></a>

<P>

Example of extreme DOF taken at hyperfocal. I believe I actually only used f/8 on this shot but it's sharp from 5ft to infinity because of the use of hyperfocal distance

<P>

<a title="In The Mountains of NH, Men are made." href=" ><img src="http://static.flickr.com/143/379801024_bfb4de3d16_d.jpg" border="0"/></a>

<P>

And another example of keeping the foreground and background sharp, the ice flow (which were were climbing) give the shot some foreground anchoring and detail. This was also taken at hypefocal distance and a middle aperture for maximum sharpness front to back.

<P>

<a title="Trap Dike March 2006" href=" ><img src="http://static.flickr.com/174/376197353_3780924d63_d.jpg" border="0"/></a>

[rose_duclos]

when you reduce the pixels, is the quality of the picture suppose to become nasty? I began playing with the MS digital image program and the two pictures I was playing with seemed that they were becoming less focused when I changed the pixel field. The pictures that I see here don't seem to have issues, so why are my photos behaving so weird?

 

Justin, you're really good with all this focus stuff - I never even heard of hyperfocal before - is this a term that came with the digital world? Is there a switch for that on the k10d? (Is it an automatic feature?)

 

-Rose

(who's amazed by how much information is needed, to take a decent picture). :)

[rose_duclos]

Ok, playing with that program still. I know the photo needs help - but this is more a test that the shrinking effect is working. (is it?)<div></div>

[prasanth]

To really get some blurry (bokeh) backgrounds, you really need to read up on depth of field. I think wiki is an excellent source, and also this place: <a href="http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/depth-of-field.htm">http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/depth-of-field.htm</a>

That place also has some other great information.

<br><br>

I think the best way to get some bokeh shots is to use fixed length (prime) lenses with the aperture wide open, to really get that shallow depth of field. But, it's not necessary. What lens are you currently using anyways? Try shooting with the aperture wide open.

<br><br>

Also, I hear stuff about the number of elements in the lens and how some give "better" bokeh, I hope someone can shed some light on that.

<br><br>

<a href=" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2006/1494593294_f8b5ffb6d9.jpg" width="500" height="335" alt="_IGP2281" /></a><br>

For this I used a 50mm SMC-M @ F/2

<br>

The SMC-M has 5 elements as apposed to the more common 6. I hear it produces better bokeh. I also own a SMC-A 50mm which is a 6 element lens, so far without much testing I just feel the SMC-M does produce better bokeh.

[dogbert]

me thinks a book on photogrpahy is in order.

[dogbert]

and a book on spelling!

[rose_duclos]

Prasanth,

 

I'm just starting out. My camera is less than 3 weeks old. I bought 2 zooms to try to have the widest range of photo choices (while keeping it cheap to start). The ones I posted here were both done with the Pentax 75-300. The other lens I got was the 28-80, but I didn't even take that one out with me. It's a light lens, but it was going to be a long day outdoors, and I decided the larger lens would do, because the focus of the day was on rocks - and wanted the ability to go macro to capture rock texture, as needed.

 

Geoff, Yes, I will be the first to agree with you, I do need to learn a lot more, and was already recommended by another friend, this past friday, to pick up the book "Photography for dummies". However, I have been slow to follow this advice, haven't gone shopping, and have spent most of my free time playing with my new toy.

 

I'm hoping to learn from experience, and the advice of others who are generous in their criticism, and knowledge. There is a lot to be learned from members of forums, like this. Hopefully, I won't become a pest, or a burden to anyone's patience. I don't want to outlive my welcome.

 

So, for everyone who has read through that lengthy justification of my presence here, I apologize if I come off sounding like a complete ditz. Please bear with me through my 'seemingly' stupid questions. It won't be long before I'll be spouting out the answers like it's secondhand, and helping newcomers with the technical side of this artform, too.

 

(perhaps I should close with a disclaimer, that I am an imperfect being, and that anything that is typed here is bound to have typos, run-on sentences, an abuse to commas, and other grammatical structures. If it's in any way unintelligible, please let me know - I'm sure I could give you an equally long, and potentially frightfully boring translation.)

 

.oO Rose :)

[godfrey]

I'll play Ernest Heminway...

<br><br>

Bokeh means blurry.<br>

Some blur is nicer than other blur.<br>

Good bokeh means you like the blur. Bad Bokeh means you don't. <br>

It continued raining.

<br><br>

vbg, Godfrey

[rose_duclos]

Ernest, it hasn't rained since Friday. There is seat open at the cafe, with a perfect view of passing pedestrians.

 

I like the blur and crazy lights on Prasanth's bench picture. (symbolic of the city, and the craziness of such a life that doesn't stop, even after dark)

 

Good Bokeh?

 

-Rose

[michael_kuhne]

Pay close attention to the advice given here, and Justin's examples. Practice makes perfect. It's pretty basic stuff, and actually not hard to do once you get used to exercising this kind of control. Your K10D, with its Hyper Program system allows you to leave the camera operating in all-auto "P" Program mode, but also allows you to instantly intervene, using the thumb wheel to change aperture, or the finger wheel to change shutter speed. Hitting the button instantly restores auto "P" mode.

 

If you want your chosen settings to stay put while turning the camera on and off during lulls between active shooting, then use the normal AV, TV, or manual modes.

 

With the Pentax Hyper Manual system, you don't have to rely on just using the wheels to set your aperture and shutter speed, but can use the button for an instant-set to correct metered exposure, and the wheels to touch up setting according to your wishes. It is very fast, unlike the manual mode on other makes. If you also use the AE-Lock button, and then, say, the AV wheel, the shutter speed will automatically follow your chosen aperture setting. Same with aperture if you use the TV wheel. The Pentax Hyper System is the fastest, most convenient operational design in the industry.

[michael_kuhne]

BTW As I understand, in the all "green" user mode, it is designed so that the Hyper System cannot be used, to prevent someone from unintentionally moving a control, and assuring only point-and-shoot simplicity of operation. The normal "P" mode is still point-and-shoot simplicity, but with Hyper control available.

[jacques c pelletier]

Hi everyone, just on related (bokeh) subject: Anyone knowing where, on this website or elsewhere, I can find detailed Depth of field (DOF) information with photo samples for pics taken (either with a prime or zoom lens) from 28mm up to 200+ ?

This sound simplistic enough but I need to brush up my technique ... badly!

Any help would be appreciated.

[michael_kuhne]

Most lenses these days do not have a DOF scale. Many that do have one that is inadequate.

 

I have a very handy DOF guide made by Fotosharp, which functions like a sliding ruler, covering various focal lengths and apertures. I've had it for 6 years or so. It is compact enough to fit in a camera bag. It did not cost much. If still available, the phone number given on it is (800) 361-8341.

[godfrey]

Continuing in Ernest ... ;-)

<br><br>

Who needs a DoF scale? <br>

Big aperture ... lots a blur. <br>

Small aperture ... more sharp. <br>

It continued to rain somewhere. <br>

<br>

ebg, Godfrey

[prasanth]

Rose,

 

I think what your doing now is right. Just going out with the camera and taking pictures. There's nothing like first hand knowledge. Just keep shooting and checking. Make sure you don't always shoot the same though, try different apertures and try different techniques.

 

With the lenses you have I think the best thing to do is maybe go to your lowest aperture, then pretty much go as close as possible to your subject rather then zooming, focus, then take the shot. This should give you something close to what you're looking for.

 

Also, as a side note. Try to have a background that is distinct. For example, a bunch of different colored and shaped objects as apposed to a brick wall with all the same colors and shape. Then you can clearly see the effect the lens is creating. Ummm what else. Oh yeah, buying books. Books are great, don't get me wrong, but why spend money on books when theres so many good photographic websites out there. The site I mentioned earlier is an excellent read (but friggin' lengthy). Wiki is great, and what's great about Wiki is, at the bottom of the page, some people include links that relate to your subject. There's even a page on Bokeh on wiki ":D And how the hell can I forget google.

 

Best of luck, and keep shooting.

 

Prasanth

[rose_duclos]

Thank you Prasanth and everyone else for the advice, and encouragement. I'm already eye-ing the 50 mm, with the thought of getting a prime. Amazon's price seems reasonable.

 

I've a lot of reading ahead, and experimenting too.

 

-Rose