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My Favourite is the Japanese term for a really good tailored suit (as in clothes). They call it a sabiro. This really means Saville Row.
--
only the lead dogs view changes
Cheers
poorsh
 
richardplondon said:
jfriedl said:
There's really nothing else in English that I know of that could fill the same spot as "bokeh".
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That is really the point. Whenever the community coins a new jargon word or word usage, or whenever it borrows a word from another language, there are two possibilities:
  • we want to deliberately be obscure or show off to a clique;
  • our present language lacks a way to express something precisely.
IMO almost all technical jargon comes from the second motivation - when we want to briefly and accurately say something that is distinct from the generally used and approximate concept. We are deliberately not using normal language, in other words.

When people want to learn how to do photography, they are (like it or not) participating in a specialist enterprise with its own areas of science, art, technique, technology, traditions and, correspondingly, terminology . It is the same with any other special enterprise such as writing, drawing, engineering, cooking, cycling. To the extent that they want to understand and discuss things along with other people, they will need to use the appropriate shared language to do so - which is equally true for talking about perspective and composition, say, as it is for analysing sensors or lenses - or for pastry, or oil painting, or poetry.

RP
Click to expand...
 
When we need jargon, we either coin a brand new term, OR we re-purpose an existing one, OR we borrow one from another language. Even when we borrow, we probably don't exactly match the source meaning or use. In fact merely being a foreign import or a neologism sometimes adds some "glamour" to what is at source quite commonplace... which is where the pretentiousness comes in, IMO.

So however it's done, it's a new usage . Generally because we want to apply it to a new (or supposedly new) idea or observation.

And whatever one person may think the jargon means, someone down the line will surely steer it into another meaning. "Bokeh" is changing its prior meaning already, and for many people, is starting to just denote "out-of-focus". That's, maybe, even a better translation - ironically ;-)

RP
 
richardplondon said:
When we need jargon, we either coin a brand new term, OR we re-purpose an existing one, OR we borrow one from another language. Even when we borrow, we probably don't exactly match the source meaning or use. In fact merely being a foreign import or a neologism sometimes adds some "glamour" to what is at source quite commonplace... which is where the pretentiousness comes in, IMO.

So however it's done, it's a new usage . Generally because we want to apply it to a new (or supposedly new) idea or observation.

And whatever one person may think the jargon means, someone down the line will surely steer it into another meaning. "Bokeh" is changing its prior meaning already, and for many people, is starting to just denote "out-of-focus". That's, maybe, even a better translation - ironically ;-)
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Bokeh is not just simply "out of focus". It's the o-o-f pattern that's generated. Pleasing patterns are a function of the lens, mainly the aperture opening shape. Bokeh comes from the Japanese words meaning blur quality.

--mamallama
 
mamallama said:
Bokeh is not just simply "out of focus". It's the o-o-f pattern that's generated. Pleasing patterns are a function of the lens, mainly the aperture opening shape. Bokeh comes from the Japanese words meaning blur quality.
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I fully realise this is the "standard" meaning. It's what a group of English-speaking photographers worldwide, decided to define for it. And it's very useful and economical to have a word for this - English didn't, before "boke" came along.

But if enough other people start to misuse the term to mean just "out-of-focus" instead, then eventually they win and that becomes what the word means . It's happened before, for example with "HDR" - where the original strict meaning has been so lost and dumbed down, that you now see so-called "HDR effects" made from a single camera JPG.

And btw, Japanese speakers tell us that "boke" DOES just mean "unsharpness" - it did not start out with this particular meaning of blur quality .

RP
 
Pixelism (noun) hence pixelist (practitioner or adherent of pixelism), to pixelise (verb) pixelistic (adjective)

Obsessive insistence on comparing different digital images solely by what their pixels look like.

Commonly linked to the line of reasoning that the respective 100% pixel view looks sharper with a lower resolution camera of the same format, pictures are made out of nothing else but pixels, therefore lower resolution cameras make better images, QED.

RP
 
I always thought the word "fanboy" sounded pretty juvenile, like a schoolyard taunt.
Even worse is the variant "fanboi," which adds an effeminate twist.

I propose we replace "fanboy" with "rockwell."

Here's how you could use the word in it's proper context:

"John is a complete Canon rockwell. He won't even touch a Pentax."
--
Marty
http://www.fluidr.com/photos/marty4650/sets/72157606210120132
http://www.flickr.com/photos/marty4650/sets/72157606210120132/show/
my blog: http://marty4650.blogspot.com/
Olympus E-30
Olympus E-P1

 
Thanks marty, I've been in photography for over fifty years and never had to use the word. is that what it means? Well I'll just keep on calling it background blur then.
Jules

Marty4650 wrote:
. Why not just call it "background blur?"
 
richardplondon said:
When we need jargon, we either coin a brand new term, OR we re-purpose an existing one, OR we borrow one from another language. Even when we borrow, we probably don't exactly match the source meaning or use. In fact merely being a foreign import or a neologism sometimes adds some "glamour" to what is at source quite commonplace... which is where the pretentiousness comes in, IMO.

So however it's done, it's a new usage . Generally because we want to apply it to a new (or supposedly new) idea or observation.

And whatever one person may think the jargon means, someone down the line will surely steer it into another meaning. "Bokeh" is changing its prior meaning already, and for many people, is starting to just denote "out-of-focus". That's, maybe, even a better translation - ironically ;-)

RP
Click to expand...
I've seen the term "Bokeh" used, for it's current meaning, in magazines from the late 60's and early 70's. I still maintain a term in use for at least 40 or 50 years isn't new.
 
JulesJ said:
Thanks marty, I've been in photography for over fifty years and never had to use the word. is that what it means? Well I'll just keep on calling it background blur then.
Jules

Marty4650 wrote:
. Why not just call it "background blur?"
Click to expand...
Or it could be foreground blur as well.
 
Dave Luttmann said:
I've seen the term "Bokeh" used, for it's current meaning, in magazines from the late 60's and early 70's. I still maintain a term in use for at least 40 or 50 years isn't new.
Click to expand...
I wasn't suggesting it was a new term; on the contrary, it is clearly such an established term that new people are already starting to apply "drift" to its normal meaning. If I said "recent", I meant, compared with e.g. "aperture" or "exposure time" which would have been necessarily used right back on day 1 of photography's course.

"Bokeh" was being discussed as an example of specialist jargon, and whether or not it was pretentious to use a foreign word like this, and how and why jargon arises in the first place. One good way of discussing something's purpose, is to discuss its origin; what happened back when it was new.

RP
 
People are lazy, hence language is lazy. One word that describes something that takes more than one word is probably going to be adopted, FUBAR and SNAFU mean anything?

Bokeh does mean blur, some think it means "quality" blur, but it doesn't, it just means blur. Americans were ridiculed by the British a century ago when Americans invented the word "bluff" to describe something that took a sentence to do. Now the Japanese are being ridiculed for creating a very usefull word. And to those who say something about using "foreign" words in the english language, I have one question to ask you. Are you on drugs? The english language is rampant with "foreign" words. From Greek, hippos = horse, potamos = river, hence hippopotamos and the river Potomac (Americans got the spelling wrong). Or Leo the lion is from the greek word for lion, leos.

The tradition of a sharp image had its origins in the States, and how important the background blur played in a photo was uniquely Japanese. In fact, after seeing some photos where the photog here at dpreview bragged about the quality of the bokeh in a photo they submitted, but the bokeh was busy and discordant, I think many still don't get the concept.



--
An excellent lens lasts a lifetime, an excellent DSLR, not so long.
 
Marty4650 said:
Having said that, it is ironic that the Japanese themselves have imported the English word "camera" ("kamera") so that they can sound like experts in their own culture.
Click to expand...
"Camera" appears to be an international word rather than an English one. You find it in German (die Kamera), French (la caméra), Hungarian (kamera) etc. Why should Japanese be an exception?

Besides, we could also ponder about its origin (camera obscura) .

--
Iván József Balázs
(Hungary)
 
Marty4650 said:
I always thought the word "fanboy" sounded pretty juvenile, like a schoolyard taunt.
Even worse is the variant "fanboi," which adds an effeminate twist.

I propose we replace "fanboy" with "rockwell."

Here's how you could use the word in it's proper context:

"John is a complete Canon rockwell. He won't even touch a Pentax."
--
Marty
http://www.fluidr.com/photos/marty4650/sets/72157606210120132
http://www.flickr.com/photos/marty4650/sets/72157606210120132/show/
my blog: http://marty4650.blogspot.com/
Olympus E-30
Olympus E-P1

Click to expand...
Wow! A photography swear word - you can swear, cuss and explete with it at the same time.

Hmmm, add KR to Luddite and you get... KRuddite, but I don't think it will catch on though (hopefully).

My own made up word which came up naturally in one of the forums (fora?) is "Mythinformation" which is of course a combination of myth and information and means commonly held beliefs which are nevertheless wrong. Examples:-

Canon images have "plasticky" skin.
More megapixels means more noise.
More megapixels means more problems with diffraction.
RAW shooters are "lazy" and don't know how to take a well exposed photo.
Auto exposure is strictly for amateurs.
 
The company that first built it was struggling for a name, and they invited some GM executives over to see the first model.

When shown the prototype, one if the executives said "That's not a car, that's a toy auto!"

The Japanese company President said, "Toy auto, toy auto, that's a good name for the car. That's it!"

And the minions with him made that the car name, except they heard him say "Toyota". And history was made!

( a true story)

p.s., if you're in the market for a nice bridge...
 
Vehicles were originally sold under the name "Toyoda" (トヨダ), from the family name of the company's founder, Kiichirō Toyoda. In September 1936, the company ran a public competition to design a new logo. Out of 27,000 entries the winning entry was the three Japanese katakana letters for "Toyoda" in a circle. But Risaburō Toyoda, who had married into the family and was not born with that name, preferred "Toyota" (トヨタ) because it took eight brush strokes (a fortuitous number) to write in Japanese,
 
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