Bad bokeh limits it's usefulness.

NottsPhoto wrote:

Jonathan Brady wrote:

I haven't noticed the bokeh as "bad" at all. Granted, I'm shooting it on a 70D so I'm cropping off the outer edges... I just took mine outside for a couple of minutes as the sun set and my dog did her business and snapped some pics of her at the edge of the frame and with the foliage of a live oak in the background (recipe for nasty bokeh from what I understand) and I didn't see anything "bad". Maybe I didn't do it right...? I've never "tested" bokeh before. But again, nothing has stood out as negative in the past.

Here are 2 snaps that are basically awful but I wasn't worried about anything other than trying to get "bad bokeh". Again, I don't know how to setup shots that are supposed to demonstrate the flaws of a lens so if this ain't it, don't lose your marbles over it

Oh, and pardon the lack of grooming. She's blowing her coat. I just brushed her for half an hour on Wednesday and she's already got (what we call) "chunks" coming out of her fur. They're so large we just grab them with our hands - they're about the length and density of a cigarette filter when you peel the paper off of it - it's NUTS! Such is life with a Siberian Husky. She's got another date with the brushes tomorrow! Anyway... pics...

i think those are pretty good examples... As you move from the center of frame you can see how the bokeh becomes more distinct and "in your face". It's not rendering across the frame the background as smoothly or evenly as I would like, and it's this shift in the nature, as well as the decrease in, for want of a better term, "smoothness" that I don't like.. Now for some this won't be a issue, for some it will be a bonus... But for me and how I want my Work to look, its a bad thing...

I think you are confusing the change in scene to the change in rendering, here. Yes, where the bright sky comes through the leafs at the border, you get less smooth bokeh. But that is a function of the change in the scene, not the lens being worse at the border.

Any 35mm lens will have a problem with the leafs against the sky part, only maybe the Zeiss 35mm f1.4 will smooth it over a bit better.

we have a quality control system in our office, so the work is PP'd by the photographer, some retouching and all the captioning is done by my assistant, and then it's reviewed by the customers account manager just prior to upload to the customers online facility... When I did my first job with that lens were I was shooting wide open (a prospectus), the account manager pulled all the shots and brought them back to me under the impression that there was something wrong... So it was a really visible difference to material we had shot previously, And it clashed with our expectations..

Then don't shoot with any 35mm lens unless you stop it down a lot, if that is your office's taste. You can't make a focal length be different than it is.

as as I have said elsewere, if it works for you, then that's a great thing... But It doesn't work for us as it's so distinctly different and distracting.

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