On 9/12/2011 8:04 AM, Chris Trask wrote:
>> The bokeh is pretty smooth, and less distracting I grant you. The
>> camera and lens combination are a pleasure to use, even though
>> it's a bit long for a standard lens, it makes a well balanced
>> piece of kit, both optically and physically.
>>
> Yes, you can just barely discern the hexagonal shapes.
>
> In the earlier photo by Moose:
>
> http://galleries.moosemystic.net/MooseFoto/index.php?gallery=Home/Garden_Summer_2011&image=_MG_1852cria60.jpg
>
> you don't see any bokeh items as the background has been sufficiently
> darkened. This photo of his is actually a nicely composed artsy photo of
> bee, flower, and flower buds without background distractions.
Thanks, glad you enjoyed it!
I'm going to disagree with you slightly on the technical meaning of bokeh,
though. Wikipedia's entry agrees with my
understanding and Mike Johnston's definition.
"In photography, bokeh is the blur, or the aesthetic quality of the blur, in
out-of-focus areas of an image, or "the way
the lens renders out-of-focus points of light." Differences in lens aberrations
and aperture shape cause some lens
designs to blur the image in a way that is pleasing to the eye, while others
produce blurring that is unpleasant or
distracting—"good" and "bad" bokeh, respectively."
and 'The English spelling /bokeh/ was popularized in 1997 in /Photo Techniques/
magazine, when Mike Johnston, the editor
at the time, commissioned three papers on the topic for the March/April 1997
issue; he altered the spelling to suggest
the correct pronunciation to English speakers, saying "it is properly
pronounced with bo as in bone and ke as in
Kenneth, with equal stress on either syllable"'
On that basis, I would say that this image has what one might call near
background bokeh in the OOF images of stems and
the buds and far background bokeh is the dim, very soft background. I'm not
sure, but it seems you may be using bokeh to
identify unpleasant or unnatural looking OOF areas.
I would say that this image has very good bokeh, with soft central lightness in
each highlight, tapering off gently and
smoothly into the background. One of the things I like about this lens is the
good bokeh at 300 mm and close focal
distances. Unfortunately, at other focal lengths, focal distances and subject
to background distances, it can have kinda
crummy bokeh.
Jim's flower has slightly bad bokeh, not necessarily in the hexagons, but in
that they are darker in the center and have
relatively bright, hard outside edges. In an otherwise identical image with
good bokeh, the hexagons would be hardly
discernible, if at all, as the center of each highlight would be bright,
tapering down in brightness to an edge that's
not clearly defined.
In Chris B's flower image the bokeh is again not particularly bad, but not
good. The hexagons in the bright green area
are less bright compared to the background so less noticeable. Further back and
against the dark background, their
darker centers and hardish edges create an unpleasant, to me, busy, edgy
quality.
Really good bokeh is rare with modern lenses.
Boke Boke Moose
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