Chasing bokeh: Fuji 50/2

John Gellings wrote:

Truman Prevatt wrote:

TEAS wrote:

Does sterile mean it is sharp lacks distortion? I generally find that these vague, undefined words are meaningless in terms of scientific reality.

Photography is not a science - it is an art.

Photography certainly is a science as well as an art. Look at the rest of what you wrote after this... its all science. Photography can be used to make art, but its origins are certainly a scientific discovery and has its roots in chemistry and physics.

Photography like every other art has benefited from gains in scientific knowledge and technical innovation that might result - but so has painting, graphics arts, etc.  But that does not make painting a scientific discipline.  Most of the master painters worked with chemist of the time to get the paints they wanted.  Some like Michelangelo was among other things an architect so had to use science to design his architecture but his architecture is not known for his scientific knowledge but for it's beauty.

Then there was da Vinci.  He he a scientist, a mathematician (here I separate scientist and mathematicians because a mathematician is nor is scientist and visa versa).  But we all agree that da Vinci was a major figure in Renaissance art.  He was also was of one of the first artist to study the rendering of three dimensions on to a plane.  He published papers with Pacioli on perspective and published some of the first drawings illustrating perspective.  That give rise to the mathematical subject of projective geometry and what da Vinci showed in his drawings is the rendering of three dimension in two is all dependent where you put the "point at infinity."

But da Vinci's art work is not science.

Yes photography has benefitted from the discovery from physics if what happens when a photon interacts with a silver halide salt.  That discovery then led to the ability to detect that photon trap in a "spec" on the silver atom.  Chemical processes were developed to the exploit that to generate a photographic plate where an emulsion was made with suspended silver halide salts.  This is not different than new pigments and bases being developed for painters.  A photo detector used in digital sensors is simply a refinement where photons counted by their interaction with electrons of differers medium other than silver halides and circularity instead of chemical developers exploit it.

There is a technology that backs up photography and there is a technology that backs up painting - there is even a technology that concentrates on recreating the paints of older times so museums can restore art work.  Does that make painting science.

But to claim the use of such advances in science and technology in art is that art is science is like calling driving your car to the grocery science.

Of course one might argue that there are multiple aspects to photography but at the end of the day even in plain simple documentation - the more artistic the presentation the better the product.

You cannot categorically say this...

And of course as an art form there are subjective descriptions which are used to describe the quality of an image. If you are not familiar with the language used to commonly describe the emotional context of art - then this might help.

Yes, to describe art...not lens attributes. Only camera nerds go to a museum and talk about bokeh.

Part of the quality in a lens is giving the photographer the ability to control the out of focus areas so the eye (and attention ) is not distracted away from the main theme ...

It can be used this way, but bokeh is not a key compositional element... it is one type of isolation technique. An overused one... and many famous photographs do not rely on bokeh at all.