The definition of "bokeh"

[Joe Pineapples II]

There may be another option that is consistent with the two most common uses of the term: "bokeh" = "blur for the portions of the photo outside the DOF" or "OOF blur", for short.

This would seem to work all the way around. If we speak of "harsh bokeh", we are speaking of "harsh OOF blur", and thus talking about the quality of the OOF blur. If we speak of "more bokeh", we are speaking of "more OOF blur", and thus talking about the quantity of the OOF blur.

How say you all?

But then we have to find something else to argue about...

Joe

 

[CQui]

...

But then we have to find something else to argue about...

Joe

As the OP asked me earlier in this thread,

Well, let's see: do two photos of the same scene, one at f/2.8 1/200 ISO 400 and the other at f/5.6 1/200 ISO 1600 have the same exposure?

 

[J A C S]

Most concepts and terms, including bokeh, have definitions that don't always make sense if you directly substitute the definition (a phrase) for the word (a word). You are guilty of reductio ad adlib.

Funny, all usages I have seen work just fine if you substitute "OOF blur".

 

[The Davinator]

Most concepts and terms, including bokeh, have definitions that don't always make sense if you directly substitute the definition (a phrase) for the word (a word). You are guilty of reductio ad adlib.

Funny, all usages I have seen work just fine if you substitute "OOF blur".

A). No they don't

B) Few agree with you

 

[peripheralfocus]

There may be another option that is consistent with the two most common uses of the term: "bokeh" = "blur for the portions of the photo outside the DOF" or "OOF blur", for short.

Yikes, do we have to wind this all the way back to the beginning?

The argument has always been over whether the definition, in English, is simply "blur" or whether it's "quality of blur". People have been arguing this point for 15 years on these forums.

What you are calling "OOF blur" is what I have called "defocus blur" in about 15 posts on this thread and the other thread in the past two days. Honestly, GB, I'm feeling ignored here. We may have to go to counseling over this.

The Japanese use the term "boke" to mean "defocus blur" -- i.e. blur in the out-of-focus areas of an image formed by a lens. The question has always been whether, in English, we have decided to use the transliterated term "bokeh" to mean something different -- i.e. "quality of blur", which the Japanese call "boke-aji".

I laid this all out in some detail in this post, which you replied to! GB, my friend, I really am feeling like you're not hearing what I'm saying. After all we've been through together!

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www.dpreview.com

Here is Mike Johnston addressing the question in 2009. (Mike Johnston was the editor of Photo Techniques when it published the articles that popularized the term "bokeh" in the English-speaking world.)

http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2009/01/what-is-bokeh.html

Mike says "bokeh" means, simply, "blur" or "out-of-focus blur". Apparently, that's the view of the writers who brought the term into use in English.

However, somewhere very soon after they published their articles, the idea got firmly established among some vocal photographers that "bokeh" means, not just blur, but quality of blur. And that definition is the one that was used by the Oxford English Dictionary when they first included the word "bokeh" in 2003.

All along, there have been other photographers who used the term to mean simply, blur. Hence this raging controversy, which you appear to believe you just solved Welcome to the party, my friend! Sorry the food and the good booze are already gone!

 

[peripheralfocus]

OOF blur is redundant.

Actually, it's not. The "OOF" part specifies what type of blur we're describing. OOF blur is different than motion blur. I prefer the term "defocus", as in defocus blur, just because it's shorter and implies the cause of the blur more directly. But either phrase seems fine to me.

This, by the way, is why the term "bokeh" even exists -- it's a quick, one-word way to specify the blur in an image caused by lens defocus, as opposed to blur in an image that has some other cause, such as subject or camera motion.

See here for more on the origins and usefulness of the term, and how it came into common use in English:

http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2009/01/what-is-bokeh.html

 

[Brev00]

OOF blur is redundant.

Actually, it's not. The "OOF" part specifies what type of blur we're describing. OOF blur is different than motion blur. I prefer the term "defocus", as in defocus blur, just because it's shorter and implies the cause of the blur more directly. But either phrase seems fine to me.

This, by the way, is why the term "bokeh" even exists -- it's a quick, one-word way to specify the blur in an image caused by lens defocus, as opposed to blur in an image that has some other cause, such as subject or camera motion.

You have a good point yet I have never seen OOF detail. I have seen frozen motion, though. When the members here and elsewhere mention bokeh they are not doing it to avoid confusion with camera motion blur. They are talking about the visual characteristics of the blur. No one says, that lens really does a great job with motion blur. The Japanese roots are intriguing but irrelevant in terms of communicating meaning in English based photo fora (or is it flora?). Anyway, something is growing here and it is not mutual understanding. As I said elsewhere, lens testing websites evaluate the bokeh performance of lenses and are specifically interested in bokeh circles with their shapes, textures, fringing, etc. Bokeh is a technical term and conflating it with blur of any sort may shed confusion for some but does not add any light.

 

[Tommi K1]

In photography, exposure is the amount of light per unit area

That is actually little wrongly written.

As in photography the "per unit" was a single silver halide size, not the whole frame size (consist from millions of halides) and it was basis for the ISO, why ISO is part of the exposure (area of unit).

The exposure was possible to do with three values, shutter/aperture opening time, aperture diameter and unit area size.

If you had constant light source (lets say like a sun) then three values build the exposure value. You changed one of them and other two were affected. There were always two sides of each value: Time, Focus and Detail (resolution).

And the same thing happens to work with today with digital cameras, but as the physical form has changed, many has gone wrong in the term "exposure", as they don't count the ISO anymore as value of detail (resolution) as they think only as electronical form where individual physical light sensitive pixels can't change size, like the silver halide did on film. But this is the limitation of the reality for many, as you need to understand that increasing ISO on digital sensor, you are lowering the digital resolution for the same detail, as you need to downscale the final image resolution by binning the pixels together to "simulate" the larger silver halide.

There were early cameras doing that, but it resulted problems as people were incapable to actually use the digital image processing capabilities, to denoise the original noisier data. And it lead to situation that sensor manufacturers stopped doing that and let the original full image resolution to be captured and offered to the user, regardless did they understand that ISO was part of the exposure like on film era and required to lower the resolution. But this time people thought they got the cake and could eat it too, failing at it, starting to talk about "total light gathering" instead "light per unit of area" aka ISO.

And what comes to Bokeh, it is always visible, always there. It isn't restricted to Out of Focus areas, but it is actually exactly in the In Focus Areas as well. That is as well the way how microcontrast, contrast and color renderition is unique per lens, but it ain't so easily visible as it is on the out of focus areas where the quality of highlights and colors mixture is more easily observed as it is enlarged to visible, unlike in focus areas that is hidden by the details.

 

[Chikubi]

There is no such thing as more bokeh.

--
http://www.flickr.com/photos/brev00

"More" does not only have to deal with quantity:

more
/môr/
determiner & pronoun
determiner: more; pronoun: more

1. comparative of many, much.
2. a greater or additional amount or degree.

In this sense we're looking at a "greater degree of bokeh", rather than "more quantity of bokeh".

Well, there is also no such thing as a greater degree of bokeh. Maybe if you go to Bokeh U. Of course, they don't take many transfers from Blur State.

Sure there is, if you actually use the word as it was intended instead of sticking like glue to a hard definition that was based on a mistake.

Here's a line from a Japanese article on how to take photos with bokeh in them:

『広角レンズ』より『望遠レンズ』で撮った方が、ボケが多くなります。

What it says is, "Moreso than with a wide angle lens, if you shoot with a telephoto lens the boke (blur) will increase (or become greater).". Another line right before it in the same section says:

そして、焦点距離は『長ければ長いほど』ボケの量が増えます。

which means, "And (or additionally) the quantity of boke (blur) increases the longer you go in focal length." And note this: this little section here, ボケの量が増えます literally translates as "the quantity of boke increases."

So yes, there is such a thing as a greater degree/quantity of boke, and if the Japanese can discuss it no problem using the term, then so can everyone else.

--
HP: http://www.emasterphoto.com
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/emasterphoto/
Photo Book: http://www.magcloud.com/browse/issue/414130

 

[peripheralfocus]

When the members here and elsewhere mention bokeh they are not doing it to avoid confusion with camera motion blur. They are talking about the visual characteristics of the blur.

The visual characteristic of the blur is what you're talking about.

But when somebody on this forum -- and this happens scores of times a day -- says something like "use a wider aperture to get more bokeh", they are using the term to mean, simply, defocus blur. Not its character, just its existence.

These competing definitions are the question at issue. The term is used both ways all the time. (And, actually, in several other ways, too -- see the post on Apple's use of it further up in this thread.)

Because I am aware of this -- and have been aware of it, to my sorrow and getting more sorrowful every minute, for 15 years -- I typically do not use the term bokeh, when I write about lenses for camera magazines. I say things like "this lens renders smooth background blur" or "I used a wider aperture to get more blur in front of the subject and behind it".

 

[Moti]

There is the question as to whether the Japanese use the term "bokeh" with regards to photography in the same manner as described in the OP. However, the usage of the term in English may not necessarily be the same as the usage of the term in Japanese.

Would be interesting, however, to find out. A while back, I was talking with an old Japanese guy about photography and he brought up "bokeh" and was more than a little surprised I knew what he was talking about "ぼけわかるですか？" Anyway, he seemed to be using the term to mean the quality of the blur, rather than the quantity of the blur.

For Japanese, the term "boke" simply means blur, no more and no less, so when the Japanese are speaking about "boke" in a photographic context, they usually are referring to the quantity of blur or the type of blur (後ぼけ-back blur/前ぼけ-front blur, for example). Which meaning they are referring is derived entirely from the context of the discussion at hand. The quality of blur would be discussed using the term "boke-aji" which literally means "blur flavor" or "flavor of blur", though in truth I have seen just "boke" used even when discussing quality, i.e. - きれいなボケ/kirei na boke = beautiful boke.

In the conversation I had with the old Japanese man, definitely meant the quality of the blur （"カノンの７０－２００のぼけがすごいきれです") or something to that effect. But, like I said, it was just that one conversation with that one old man.

For English speakers this may be rather ambiguous and unsettling, but Japanese is a very ambiguous language and the bulk of meaning comes from the context. A very, very simple example of this would be that, except for a very few instances, Japanese has no plurals, so if you were talking about cats for example, you'd say "one cat" or "ten cat" - the word "cat" never changes and the plural meaning would be implied from the quantity mentioned in the context.

For this reason, English speakers learning Japanese can have a really hard time with it in the early stages until they get used to dealing with the ambiguity, and conversely Japanese speakers learning English have a hard time dealing with the intricacies of word choice and subtlety of meaning that English thrives on.

Myself, I think the English usage of "bokeh" is, despite what folks may or may not agree with, slowly shifting to become more in line with the Japanese usage, and interestingly enough, when I was Googling while writing my reply to Gollywop in the prior thread, I found a Japanese article regarding the international usage of the word "bokeh" that noted the same trend and also felt that despite its original English meaning of "boke-aji/quality of blur" the current meaning is shifting towards "boke/blur".

I personally am fine with either meaning in English and don't find it ambiguous at all as I'm already used to thinking about it in that sense anyway. YMMV

English is, of course, a dynamic language. We are seeing, for example, that "exposure" is typically used to describe the brightness of the photo, and it's all but a done deal that the term "aperture" is used to mean the relative aperture of the lens.

I agree. This is why I find it very important to try and understand what people really mean instead of sticking to the exact definitions, otherwise even a simple activity such as blowjob for example, would end up with a big disappointment.

Moti

--
http://www.musicalpix.com

I suppose you have given enough of them to have run into this problem before, since this is (at least) the second time you brought this up.

I'm the one who is getting it baby, but as you've asked so nicely, I always like to use it in order to demonstrate your narrow minded attitude of sticking to the exact terminology, but I can replace it in the future if this example is too difficult for you to digest.

Moti

--
http://www.musicalpix.com