Stone- he's talking about the Mamiya 6/7 family of rangefinders, not the RB/RZ.
Stone- he's talking about the Mamiya 6/7 family of rangefinders, not the RB/RZ.
This thread belongs in the bulshitters thread!
a) blade count is mostly irrelevant for bokeh because generally (unless there are very few) you can't count 'em in the image. There are lenses with few blades and beautiful bokeh (e.g. CZJ Flektogon 35/2.4 with hexagons)
b) the dominant factor for smooth bokeh in a traditional lens is the presence of spherical aberration. It dims the edges of the blur discs, thereby reducing hard edges
c) the ultimate bokeh machine is the Minolta/Sony 135 STF due to the presence of its apodisation filter. You get blur gaussians not blur discs, therefore absolutely NO hard edges in the OOF area. It's like taking a defocused image of a defocused image...
d) second choice are the sink-strainer lenses as seen on some MF systems
e) anyone who thinks poorly of Mamiya bokeh# - on the basis of half-remembered internet "wisdom" - needs a good slap.
# or any major brand. They all have "good" and "bad" lenses and if you stick to primes, the bad are few and far between. You can get horrific bokeh from super-zooms though - again with the correction of SA to enhance sharpness often causes nisen bokeh.
Anything to do with &0keh is BS.
Anything to do with &0keh is BS.
In 35 years of photography I have never occupied myself with the subjective theory of bokeh. Never. I'm amazed at the discourse here. Does anybody actually do serious, considered photography? Do the clients are there any? actually remark or fuss and fidget "all about the bokeh"? Or is it about chasing little circles around the frame? Please. Bokeh is bullshit. Get on with serious photography and leave this pseudo-intellectual drivel to such rubbish heaps as the revered photo.net Bokeh Club (where else...) .
Why do so many people get their knickers in a knot over the term and what it represents? I get the annoyance at discussions that put way too much emphasis on it and/or get snobby about which lens has the "best" bokeh - but it's just a word that encapsulates the quality of out of focus areas. Some lenses have smooth and creamy bokeh - some have harsh and discordant. Most are somewhere in between. We know that the shape of the lens aperture has a major impact on the quality of out-of-focus areas - the more round the aperture, the smoother, to a point. I remember seeing some chromes a friend of mine shot using a 14" Commercial Ektar, a 14" Caltar, and a 355mm Kern Gold-Dot Dagor. The Ektar and Caltar were very close, as they should be - they both are in the same shutter (an Ilex #5), and the 14" Caltar is for all intents and purposes a 14" Commercial Ektar. The Gold-Dot Dagor was noticeably harsher, as it was mounted in a modern Copal 3 with either a 6 or 8 blade aperture. The surprising thing about the Ektar/Caltar was that there was in fact a difference. The Caltar was based on the 14" Commercial Ektar, and was very slightly tweaked. The difference proves that lens design in itself does have something to do with it, not just aperture.
Lens design has virtually everything to do with it. The number of blades in the aperture will determine the shape of out of focus bright spots, nothing more.
I personally get "my knickers in a twist" because most who fling this annoyingly pretentious term about know not of what they speak.
I don't like the word "bokeh" because it is not clear how to pronounce it and its definition is so often misunderstood. Maybe there is some long and descriptive German word that would have been a better choice. That could have been fun.
Just because some fools misuse a term doesn't invalidate the term. Nuclear weapons are no less potent because George W. Bush calls them "Nookular".
Well, yes it does - if I'm trying to communicate with said fools, we'll be speaking different languages. If I use the term correctly, they won't know what I mean.
Well, it's been demonstrated that at least some medicine is a waste of time, if not actively harmful. I imagine that, confronted with a layman who flings misused medical terms about, the average doctor would think him/her a pretentious bore at best.Well, then medicine is a waste of time... compared to the average doctor, the average patient is a fool when it comes to medical terminology. But that shouldn't stop a doctor from distinguishing between a melanoma and a sarcoma (two kinds of cancers, for the non-initiated). Both terms have meaningful differences and should not be conflated. Maybe instead of throwing out the baby with the bathwater you should either educate the fools, or stop talking to them.
The average doctor communicates in insurance codes and has to pick one out in minutes. If you walk
into his office with antlers growing out of your head, he can only charge for something the insurance
company will reimburse, so codes it as "wart removal". At least a term like "bokeh" still has some vowels to it. The cell-phone generation will probably contract this to "bkh" and it will become confused
with some kind of chemical hamburger preservative that cause the antler growth in the first place!
Well, it's been demonstrated that at least some medicine is a waste of time, if not actively harmful. I imagine that, confronted with a layman who flings misused medical terms about, the average doctor would think him/her a pretentious bore at best.
I've found fools uneducable, and I don't use the term "bokeh". Instead, I use the words "rendition of out of focus areas" which are accurate, self explanatory, and at least somewhat understandable to the unitiated. The purpose of language is communication, jargon is understood only by the elect. I personally find jargon annoying.
"Rendition" is the completely wrong word FYI
~Stone
Mamiya: 7 II, RZ67 Pro II / Canon: 1V, AE-1, 5DmkII / Kodak: No 1 Pocket Autographic, No 1A Pocket Autographic | Sent w/ iPhone using Tapatalk
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