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BB. Who cares if icycles form, I got Merlot to keep me warm. It feels chilly at 800 feet here. And there is snow on Mauna Kea where the big scopes are sitting. Bokeh talk is just kind of amusing. And I am indulgently amused. It goes with other great enigmas like the latest redefinition of DOF as thin sharp slivers. I recall when I once borrowed via Canon Professional Services their lovely and pricey FD 85mm 1.2 lens ( I thought 8 bills was outrageous silly mew). Too narrow a slice for me to focus on. Now, with AF and Intelligent Auto any camera can do almost anything. My latest arrived Lumix SZ100 , a real cutey I can wear on a belt has 24 scenes it knows more than I to handle. Cute dessert. Romantic sunset. Other sunsets galore and three types of night shots. ( no setting for backpacks sorry or kittens, no I think there is!) So, sportsfans, anyone can be an arteeste with such a computer with a Leica lens no less. Nu? Don't answer. The camera really is the thing. But don't give that away, I still like my only craft--where is my Garbo and my Dietrich or AVA or my Marillyn. Charlize will do... and my complete Dremel tool kit sits there forever. Someday I gonna need it... Happy Trails. Do keep your sunnyside up, all. I have made 81 and still got all the marbles and that aint bad.. And tipple all you like, no work tommorrow. Except I got to declutter a wee bit those 30 canvas bags. So many bags I forgot about. Ah well, my problem. Edited by GerrySiegel
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am designing a photo similar to the Fred shot.

That's great. Enjoy! Would love to see it when it's done.

 

Maybe you can post it to Gerry's other thread and we can all critique it when it's done. LOL. :)

 

Just kidding about the critiques, of course, but I would love to see it so let me know if you post it to PN or have a link to it.

We didn't need dialogue. We had faces!
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I've been in film photography since 1974. Not once have I ever given any consideration to what kind of bokeh there is in any of my photos. And I never will.

 

That's a bit sad.

Why ignore a part of your image?

 

This seems like willy waving to me. 'Oh, look! I'm a serious photographer! I don't do bokeh!'

(I'm poking fun at the way the thread has gone, not you, Vincent)

 

I too have been taking pics for the last 40 odd years. I have been paying attention to my backgrounds since I started,

though probably only since the early 90's have I thought about bokeh. It's part of an image. Embrace it.

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I once borrowed via Canon Professional Services their lovely and pricey FD 85mm 1.2 lens ( I thought 8 bills was outrageous silly mew). Too narrow a slice for me to focus on. --Gerry Siegel

I remember going through my f/1.2 phase. I even bought the old Canon rangefinder back in 2008 or so so that I could use the 50mm f/0.95 on it. (It was not really any good until stopped down to about f/2). As for the Canon EF 85mm f/1.2, I just got tired of carrying it around (huge chunk of glass!), and I really could not see that it was any better at other apertures than the 1.8.

 

As for DOF itself, I do remember reading instructions about opening the aperture to get a shallow DOF way back around 1977. Seemed pretty cool then; still does when that is what I want. It's amazing how little I think about background blur. Maybe I should start thinking about it more, but I have chosen not to.

 

Lannie

Edited by Landrum Kelly
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I have been photographing since early 1990. For the first 25 years or so, I didn't pay much attention to the smoothness of backgrounds or the shape of highlights in the background. Nowadays it's a little bit different story, sometimes I think I'm more interested in the backgrounds than the subject. Are there any cure for this, than buying fast prime lenses with circular aperture blades or trying to find old m42 lenses, which might make an unique bokeh?

To fix your problem don't read posts from forums like this. You're influenced by others who are into the bokeh in recent years. Back in the old days film speed was slow and people use large aperture lenses wide open trying to do low light photography hand held. Doing so making their pictures having very narrow DOF and they don't like that but accept that because the film speed was slow. Now that some camera doesn't want to shoot at ISO slower than 200. Those who are into low light (that including me) can shoot low light hand held at f/8 so we need no fast lenses. But there are people who thought there must be a use for those fast lenses .... so there it begins.

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To fix your problem don't read posts from forums like this. You're influenced by others who are into the bokeh in recent years. Back in the old days film speed was slow and people use large aperture lenses wide open trying to do low light photography hand held. Doing so making their pictures having very narrow DOF and they don't like that but accept that because the film speed was slow. Now that some camera doesn't want to shoot at ISO slower than 200. Those who are into low light (that including me) can shoot low light hand held at f/8 so we need no fast lenses. But there are people who thought there must be a use for those fast lenses .... so there it begins.

So true, only idiots driving Ferrari, because Honda Civic can perfectly take you to speed limit, when you go to buy groseries.

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I didn't pay much attention to bokeh, or background blur as it was better known, until going mirrorless. I used a Leica M2 for many years, and with focusing so problematic, I seldom opened wider than f/5.6. I was less cautious using SLRs and DSLRs, except the lenses were not all that great when wide open. Sure, you could blur the background, but getting something, anything sharp was elusive.

 

Now lenses are much better (and expensive) wide open, and focusing is a breeze, either auto or manual at 5x-12x magnification. I particularly like longer lenses, and an 85/1.8 is a good choice for many applications.

 

Sony A7Rii + Zeiss Basis 85/1.8 at f/1.8

_DSC3474.jpg.275fe1b0a2d142301460b342abd9191a.jpg

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That's a bit sad.

Why ignore a part of your image?

 

This seems like willy waving to me. 'Oh, look! I'm a serious photographer! I don't do bokeh!'

(I'm poking fun at the way the thread has gone, not you, Vincent)

 

No offense taken.

 

I just looked through some 600+ Kodachrome 64 slides I shot over the past 10 years. Just one had objectionable bokeh. IMO, that speaks volumes about my Nikkor lenses.

 

Not bad for not trying LOL.

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No offense taken.

 

I just looked through some 600+ Kodachrome 64 slides I shot over the past 10 years. Just one had objectionable bokeh. IMO, that speaks volumes about my Nikkor lenses.

 

Not bad for not trying LOL.

That's why you didn't care about it, try use "modern" slow zoom lenses with VR activated all the time, and you will notice messy backgrounds in some pictures.

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BeBu, shooting after dark or not, if I have a busy or distracting background and want to emphasize or isolate my subject I don't shoot at f/8 just because i can, I open up. Actually, when I shot all my gels over a range of f/4 to f/16 for a chromazome chart enabling me to instantly create a shade from my gels, I realized, I had sensor dust for the first time in a while because at 1.4-3.2 if is just part of the blur (english for bokeh). I don't shoot at the wide end only because I have to, I shoot there to match the rest of the image. Same as metering my background to have it 1 stop darker. It's not a fad, it's done to make the viewers eye be driven to the subject. Of course unless I am shooting a bright background and my subject is darker then I want the bg brighter. It's all part of maximizing the controls we have on our cameras and lighting. It's why I sometimes find myself struggling to get my subject far enough from the bg so I can control them independently, or in gelling, keeping spill of the bg. Heard a neat description how shutter speed allows independent bg control. Once the subject is lit, adjusting shutter speed is like venetian blinds making the bg lighter or darker. As a location shooter, it isn't unusual for me to add lights to the bg for accents, or the cliched shooting in tungsten white balance making the outdoors have a blue night effect and knocking down ambient to shoot day as night then cto gel my lights to get proper wb of subject. It's all just part of crafting the image.
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Are there any cure for this,

 

Yes: growing up. Bokeh is the fetish of the decade - preceding dynamic range, number of pixels, and mirrorless cameras. Drink a glass of cold water, take a deep breath, clear your mind, then carry on and think no more about it.

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Robin Smith
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What's interesting to me is thinking that because something like bokeh has, indeed, become fetishized, the reaction should be to completely ignore it. That reaction seems to me as much a kind of fetish as the original one. Why not just not fetishize it and instead attend to it as it's warranted to get out of a photo the result desired? Just think, there may be a whole lot of healthy ground between fetishizing background blur on the one hand and ignoring it on the other, for instance understanding it and working well with it!
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We didn't need dialogue. We had faces!
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Or laugh at it as a marketing gag for something we all know too well and do not need to have it rubbed into our noses lately. As if it is something like a religious totem. DPR urges all to buy a 135 mm lens because of its mouth-watering' bokeh. Just today. No kidding. Reminds me of the ads for vitamins that keep you young and virile. It is, now that I will grant, a boon for some advertisers and those seeking to make us get one more lens. If you can't define it, maybe it is a phantom. It is a fetish because we need fetishes for the masses. Not, I declare, for the knowledgable and hip. Like us but of course. It has that new foreign sound, as something once did if we called it in French. Or Spanish. It is so intriguing. The mysterious orient. Delicious bokeh al dente. I still think it is just silly to give it such column bandwith. But that is just me speaking.
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marketing gag for something we all know too well and do not need to have it rubbed into our noses lately

 

Exactly! Hence my admonishments. One of the many marketing ruses to stimulate desire and to get you to part with your money that has only a fairly tenuous connection with a good photograph.

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Robin Smith
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Gerry, I try not to let advertisers influence me one way or the other. They won’t be influencing me to buy a new lens based on a sexy adjective they might come up with to describe the bokeh. Nor will they influence me by turning me off to something because of the stupid way they might promote it. I really don’t read much about cameras or lenses, so I’m not in touch with much advertising to be influenced by it one way or the other. When I feel a need for a new camera or lens, I do some research, ask some people who know more than me, and get the purchase over with as quickly as possible. In any case, damned if I’m going to let advertisers dictate or influence how I think about, look at, or use various aspects or characteristics of a photograph, whether that influence is by my reacting positively to their sloganeering or negatively to it.
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We didn't need dialogue. We had faces!
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It takes a certain kind of image to make any kind of bokeh look good in my opinion and I don't see them too often. It seems to be popular with the crowd that didn't grow up shooting film and kind of a nostalgia thing. Nothing wrong with that, just doesn't do much for me.
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I don't think it has anything to do with film v. digital. "Bokeh" is one of the few supposedly artistic qualities you can buy. Get Zeiss Glass--I mean ZEISS GLASS--and you will Have Bokeh. No talent, observation or practice required. You can feel superior with nothing but an outlay of cash. "Look at the way that lens "draws". See the creamy "bokeh". You can't see it? Well, we artists..."

Okay, I exaggerate, and yes blur can be distracting in some circumstances, and nice blur may add a certain indefinable quality to a good image.

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I don't think it has anything to do with film v. digital.

LOL. Les, I think at this point we may just have to forever accept the fact that for some people EVERYTHING has to do with film v. digital. :oops:

"Bokeh" is one of the few supposedly artistic qualities you can buy.

Remember, though, the age-old comment made to so many photographers . . . "What a beautiful photo, you must have a really good camera." I think the sense that you can buy what it takes to make a good picture has been around for a long time and applies to lots more than bokeh!!!

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We didn't need dialogue. We had faces!
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Wo, I lack a ready model but my Balinese girl will stand in and just did. Lumix GX 8 with a 1972 Minolta MC Rokkor PG 1.2 at F 2.0. Metabones tube to the m4/3 mount... Under a porch shade on black plexi with background the mock orange hedge. Distance to figurine was about two feet and the hedge was like 20 feet. late afternoon near 5 PM sun. So it has a lot to do with distances. " Hey Gerry, come shoot my girl. Ok. Can you do bokeh? You bet. I do great bokeh. Did you like it creamy or just yogurt style or swirly. I got settings for all. And if Lotta has zits i even have a set of soft filters. Been at this since I was knee high to Dick Avedon :-)959619874_Baliheadbydbeforehedge.thumb.jpg.a3e69bf5e92f17310295b3e4869f7573.jpg
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