Appreciation of anything aesthetic is surely open to opinion through its nature as a subjective thing? Therefore saying bokeh as an aesthetic is “bad” is just an opinion. To allocate the word “bad” to a failure of the function of blur is fine, but if bokeh is an aesthetic thing, to allocate the word “bad” to it is – at least to my mind – not a fully considered approach defining it. So, if a lens causes “bubbly” distracting bokeh it is in fact more accurate to say that it fails in the function of subject/background separation, not that it fails at bokeh. Other people describe “creamy” bokeh using technical terms like “under-corrected spherical aberrations”, which might sound like a bad thing, when in fact it’s actually “over corrected spherical aberrations” that can cause “bad” bokeh… … etc, etc.Īdditionally to this, bokeh is actually – as mentioned at the beginning of the post – better thought of as the description of the aesthetic of blur, not a description of the extent of the function of blur. But “creamy” bokeh can also be “bad” since lenses that create “creamy” bokeh in the background, might create “bad” bokeh in the foreground. As examples, some people define “neutral” as the same as “good”, whereas others might describe “creamy” bokeh as the same as “good”. The problem comes about to a greater extent because of the vagaries of the use of some words, and the confusing nature of the others. After all, it’s fair to say that when people are describing lenses with swirling bokeh, they’re often quick to relate such adjectives as “swirling” along side “great” or “terrible” or however they feel about that type of bokeh. The above is an obvious, and many would argue easy to avoid issue. To them, this Bokeh might be said to be “great”, which, as a synonym of good, can make things terribly confusing. Some folks crave crazy, swirling highly distracting Bokeh that makes a subject look like its being sucked into some sort of spinning votex. Bokeh is an extremely subjective topic within photography. Good and bad might therefore seem like reasonable adjectives to use, the problem is, when using them in isolation they can very easily be misinterpreted. It is this objective merit by which many define “good” and “bad” bokeh – “good” bokeh is easy to ignore and sits back from the subject, “bad” bokeh is distracting and sits forward in the composition. By having a subject in focus and a background out-of-focus the eye is naturally drawn to what is sharp, and what is out-of-focus can be all but ignored. It is to isolate our subject and to sit it forward from what is behind it. When, as photographers, we choose to knock a background out of focus, the primary reason is to separate our subject from said background. But, once these basics have been grasped, the words bad and good are best set aside. Though for the sake of understanding the basics, I do concede that there is some sense to the idea of using these simple adjectives. To make things slightly more complicated – at least for the sake of this post – I personally don’t like using the words “bad” or “good” in my descriptions of bokeh. The more scientifically minded often then relate these adjectives back to what they think is going on in a lens, more often than not, mentioning things like spherical aberrations and astigmatism. The less scientifically minded might just use simple adjectives like “good” or “bad”, with perhaps the more creatively minded using adjective words that leave a little to interpretation like “creamy” and “bubbly”. The answer to this broad lack of scientific measurement is a large spectrum of adjectives. MTF charts can show potential for “confused” bokeh, but how this is actually interpreted I don’t know, or care, I have little time for graphs. Unlike most subjects within optics, there’s little or no way to measure bokeh objectively. If you’ve ever read anything on the subject you will likely know that the word Bokeh is a Japanese word that has – at some point in the not particularly distant past – made its way into the English language. What is Bokeh?īokeh is the word used to describe the aesthetic qualities of the out of focus areas within an image. In the first part I talked about three subjects, contrast, sharpness and flare. In this part I have managed to construct an entire post on a subject that I find myself quite frequently rolling my eyes at, bokeh. This post is the second part in a series of posts looking at the definitions of various lens terminology.
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