Is getting maximum OoF areas/bokeh the reason people overwhelmingly prefer aperture priority bodies?

[wiltw]

A lot of lenses aren't at their best WFO as well. Even a stop can make a big difference, while still delivering bokeh, and as DOF perception is also influenced by focal length, not just aperture, WFO needn't be a forgone conclusion, and much depends on the intent and knowledge of the photographer. GWC's as the OP posits, do in fact exist but as I opined earlier, that's a narrow subset, and most working or serious photographers are way beyond that.

Change of DOF with various FL is ONLY due to the apparent subject size change. If you move the camera to suit the FL of the lens, to keep the subject the same amount of the frame for all shots, DOF Zone Depth is IDENTICAL.

50mm at 20' vs. 100mm at 40' vs. 200mm at 80' vs 400mm at 160' vs. 800mm at 320'...all have identical DOF Zone Depth at the same aperture!​

 

[JBrunner]

Change of DOF with various FL is ONLY due to the apparent subject size change. If you move the camera to suit the FL of the lens, to keep the subject the same amount of the frame for all shots, DOF Zone Depth is IDENTICAL.

50mm at 20' vs. 100mm at 40' vs. 200mm at 80' vs 400mm at 160' vs. 800mm at 320'...all have identical DOF Zone Depth at the same aperture!​

Yes, hence the word "perception". FL also determines FOV of course. If I move the camera in with a shorter FL to the same subject size the FOV will change, so the perception will change, even though the COF equation has not.

 

[Kodachromeguy]

Diffraction becomes visible at f/11.

For what focal length? You can't state a single number. The usual advice for mid-20th century film use was that diffraction compromised a photograph at about one quarter of the lens focal length. For a 50mm lens, that was 12.5 or f/11. However, the size you intend to enlarge a negative will influence the perception of sharpness, so you may opt to ignore the 1/4 recommendation.

 

[ChristopherCoy]

I think it's because it's an easy/lazy way out. It's the instagram filter for the camera.

 

[Bill Burk]

Pentax ESII and OM-4 user here. Only ever used Aperture priority.

It’s the lens focal length that determines the shutter speed I want, based on 1/f shutter speed.

What’s the Shutter Speed priority camera going to do when you run out of light? Underexposed your film. What’s the aperture priority camera going to do when you hit the edge of light that you can safely handhold?

Going on a tripod or not taking the picture, or maybe risking blur and being careful.

I usually hear it when it’s gone below safe handheld. Then I figure out next shot what to do about it.

 

[Chan Tran]

Back in the days of ISO 400 max sensitivity film, you learned to use max aperture plenty!

Nope back in the days when I shot Kodachrome 64 I still don't use max aperture. If I can't use long exposure I rather not taking the pictures. I hate shallow DOF images.

 

[Sirius Glass]

Change of DOF with various FL is ONLY due to the apparent subject size change. If you move the camera to suit the FL of the lens, to keep the subject the same amount of the frame for all shots, DOF Zone Depth is IDENTICAL.

50mm at 20' vs. 100mm at 40' vs. 200mm at 80' vs 400mm at 160' vs. 800mm at 320'...all have identical DOF Zone Depth at the same aperture!​

Yes, hence the word "perception". FL also determines FOV of course. If I move the camera in with a shorter FL to the same subject size the FOV will change, so the perception will change, even though the COF equation has not.

In the early '70s I had gotten several lenses for my Minolta slr. I was photographing a statue and I wanted to keep the image size and the exposure. The 50mm lens did not have enough depth of field, so I put on the 35mm lens and moved closer. Again there was not enough depth of field. So I put on the 28mm lens and moved in. Again there was not enough depth of field. So I put on the 21mm lens and moved in. Again there was not enough depth of field. Same problem with the zoom telephoto lens.

Years later when I was working at Kodak I asked my boss about it. He had me write the lens equation on the board. He then had me make a substitution related to keeping the image size the same. All the focal length terms dropped out of the equation. I wish that I had written down the mathematics so I could post it now. Does anyone remember the mathematics and would please post it?

 

[reddesert]

This is kind of like going back to 1983 or so and reading magazine articles about shutter priority vs aperture priority and arguments over which one was better. There were a few cameras (Canon A-1 and some others) that let you choose, but they were mostly expensive for an amateur.

At the time, manufacturers weren't choosing one or the other based on people's need for bokeh, but on convenience of manufacture and of operation. I don't recall the word 'bokeh' making it into the US English photography literature until the 2000s or so. I read the rec.photo.* Usenet newsgroups in the 1990s and don't remember people talking about bokeh. Most of the passionate arguments were about Canon vs Nikon, and AF speed. Zoom lenses were in fashion and fast primes were not as much.

Of course the use of wide apertures to blur the background was known and examples could be found in any book, but the word 'bokeh' and arguments about the character of the blur were not so common yet in the 1990s, except for the obvious example of mirror telephoto lenses. I don't think "I must have the widest aperture and shoot wide open all day" was as common an amateur photographer goal in the 1980s-90s as it seems to be now.

 

[reddesert]

In the early '70s I had gotten several lenses for my Minolta slr. I was photographing a statue and I wanted to keep the image size and the exposure. The 50mm lens did not have enough depth of field, so I put on the 35mm lens and moved closer. Again there was not enough depth of field. So I put on the 28mm lens and moved in. Again there was not enough depth of field. So I put on the 21mm lens and moved in. Again there was not enough depth of field. Same problem with the zoom telephoto lens.

Years later when I was working at Kodak I asked my boss about it. He had me write the lens equation on the board. He then had me make a substitution related to keeping the image size the same. All the focal length terms dropped out of the equation. I wish that I had written down the mathematics so I could post it now. Does anyone remember the mathematics and would please post it?

I worked this out a previous time when you mentioned it - see the post, #15 in this thread: Charts of Depth of field vs focal length, scaling f/#

takeaway message: If you change focal length and then move your feet so as to keep magnification (image size) constant, then the DOF remains constant.

 

[wiltw]

Nope back in the days when I shot Kodachrome 64 I still don't use max aperture. If I can't use long exposure I rather not taking the pictures. I hate shallow DOF images.

You obviously never worked as a photojpournalist, when 'got to get a shot' was what mattered to an editor, and some shoots were in poor light and flash was not allowed!

 

[Pieter12]

My macro lens is only usable at f/5.6 and f/8

Wonder what kind of macro lens that is. Most macro lenses close down at least one more stop because at the distances they are designed for, the extra depth of field is usually needed. My macro/micro lenses (depends on the mfg for nomenclature) stop down to f/32 and don't show noticeable diffraction wider than 22.

 

[film_man]

I think by now we have established that photographic equipment, lenses, shutter priority and their combinations have moved on a bit since the 1970s...

 

[Don_ih]

I think by now we have established that photographic equipment, lenses, shutter priority and their combinations have moved on a bit since the 1970s...

Yes, but most people here are using cameras and lenses made in or before the 70s.

Wide-open and bokeh seem to me to be for SLRs - it's generally not something you think about with rangefinders. When shooting a rangefinder, you tend to focus where you think the d.o.f. will get everything you want in the picture in focus. Not being able to notice the nice psychedelics of the background kinda puts them out of your mind.

That said, I find bokeh much more noticeable on the gg of large format. But you are generally trying to get your subject in focus from nose to neck....

And, of course, on a DSL, you can see the bokeh in every shot as it shows up on screen.

And, you know, the bokeh generated when standing in front of trees looks like the backdrop for school photos, so maybe people are impressed with the professionalism of the photographer when they see it.....

 

[Chan Tran]

You obviously never worked as a photojpournalist, when 'got to get a shot' was what mattered to an editor, and some shoots were in poor light and flash was not allowed!

I never worked as photographer. Getting an image at any cost isn't my goal.

 

[film_man]

Yes, but most people here are using cameras and lenses made in or before the 70s.

Wide-open and bokeh seem to me to be for SLRs - it's generally not something you think about with rangefinders. When shooting a rangefinder, you tend to focus where you think the d.o.f. will get everything you want in the picture in focus. Not being able to notice the nice psychedelics of the background kinda puts them out of your mind.

That said, I find bokeh much more noticeable on the gg of large format. But you are generally trying to get your subject in focus from nose to neck....

And, of course, on a DSL, you can see the bokeh in every shot as it shows up on screen.

And, you know, the bokeh generated when standing in front of trees looks like the backdrop for school photos, so maybe people are impressed with the professionalism of the photographer when they see it.....

I just don't understand this constant generalisation that rangefinders are just for wide angle street shooting as if everyone wants to be HCB or Gilden. You can do portraits with rangefinders just as well as you can with a SLR. I can use my 50mm at f/2 on the M4 and know what I will get. I also know when I want to use f/5.6 or f/8 for more DOF and when I should try f/4 too. I know what look I want when I take a photo and the aperture is an important part of the final image. Film choice, framing, aperture. To me, shutter speed is mainly an irrelevance until it gets below 1/30 or I hit 1/1000 on the M4.

All this thread tells us is that you don't shoot like I do and we both shoot differently to anybody else.

 

[Helge]

Bokeh, to make a stab at the etymology and original use, even though the Japanese word simply means fog or haze, in photography terms it most certainly originated as an allegory of the practice of applying gradated print colour on woodblocks when printing Japanese woodblock prints.

Above is not a wood block print (just something I had handy on my HDD), but it perfectly illustrates the principle and the Japanese sensibility for gradated colour.

Also historically, whether it's SP or AP that is easiest to implement and on whether that has any bearing on the preferred method, I think is quite undecided.
From what I can glean it's very, very close.
Even if we take into account the difference between leaf and focal plane shutter control.
Both can in principle be controlled equally easily with a simple capture the needle system. And of course if there ever was a slight difference, when you bring solenoid, voice coils and motors, in more modern cameras (70's and up) into the equation, it's very much the same.

Outside of a very few special cases, it's neigh on impossible to get an accurate impression or idea of how bokeh and DoF is going fall in the photo, by stopping down. You can get a very rough idea of what is going to be in focus, but it is rough, because of course the screen get's darker and grainier once you stop down.
Thus you are left with imagination, which no matter the experience, will not be accurate at all with all the variables. Especially where it really matters, with tele lenses that are almost fundamentally slowish in handheld versions and therefore present a darker image in the finder.

Part of my, perhaps implicit, reasoning here is that shutter priority is actually a better way of controlling aperture, than directly controlling aperture.
Most of the cameras that has SP as only program, has some accommodation for letting you know what the aperture is going to be, so it's not completely up to the camera.
This is all about speed of capture. The second you are doing something measured and precise, like a landscape or a still-life you will use a tripod and manual exposure.
SP is just a version of P (program) with a hard skewing in one direction.
Depending on the lens, you have very different possibilities WRT shutter speed. That's part of the genius behind the lens modes on the Canon T70. There is just build, in making it even easier.

Staying in the sweet zone of optimal apertures of the lens, if you are that way inclined, is also fully possible with SP.

The difference between 1.4 and 2.8 can be quite small and as said impossibly hard to judge or imagine accurately. Even harder with higher apertures like the difference between f8 and f11.
On the other hand with shutter speeds you very often have an idea of what is reasonable in a given situation, what you absolutely need or can get away with, with a given lens. And you might also have some idea, that you want a certain amount of motion blur and even camera movement blur, or contrary that it should e avoided as far as possible for that particular photo.

What I often observe with me and others, is that out of habit or laziness, that the aperture will either go to full open as default, or you will set it to optimum aperture and forget about it.
And then it will stay there, until you are forced to think about it. That will lead to suboptimal and boring photos IMO.
Not so with shutter speeds. There you are forced to think about the implications all the time.

Now, I'm not saying that AP doesn't have its place. It certainly does.
I just have come to the conclusion that it often becomes a glorified substitute for P mode, with none of the inherent variety that is build into that.

 

[Jim Jones]

It is difficult to have a meaningful discussion on choosing between SP and AP without also discussing the effect that subject matter, lighting, print or display characteristics, film format, and most important, personal preferences have. Seventy years ago I was delighted with the photos a Mercury II camera delivered with its triplet lens. After several thousand rolls of 35mm film and perhaps even more digital images, those early images are an embarrassment.
A quick test of the effect of stopping a lens down is to use an enlarger to project a large image of fine grain film and study the image through a grain magnifier while adjusting the aperture. The several 50mm f/2.8 EL-Nikkor lenses I've used consistently show best results at f/4 or f/5.6. Fine grain is less crisp at f/8. This is also true of the images captured by the camera. With a very few other subjects, stopping down to f/22 or perhaps f/32 did not lose any detail necesary to give the desired image. For best performance I almost never stop down a 300mm f/5.6 Vivitar in Nikon mount.
The advice given on forums like this can provide some guidance to other photographers, but the final choices are best left to the individual photographer to determine by his own standards.

 

[Anon Ymous]

I have no use for shutter priority at all. I've only used it accidentally, thinking that I selected either aperture priority, or manual. I don't shoot wide open either, the lenses usually don't perform that well and don't care about bokeh at all. I'll pick an aperture depending on the case, it could be a matter of depth of field, or lack of it, or maximum sharpness. The shutter speed is only taken into consideration if its not hand-holdable, or unavailable. For the rest of the cases, it doesn't matter at all as far as I am concerned.

 

[Alan Gales]

If I was shooting sports or flying birds, I'd use shutter priority. Since I shoot landscapes mainly, I'll use aperture especially because I'm shooting a tripod although since I use film, that's on my metering. The lens and cameras are all manual settings for aperture and shitters. When I travel or just running around in the street, I leave my digital camera on P which is modified Auto. I let the camera do the thinking for me. It's smarter than I am most of the time.

Alan, my very first 35mm camera was a Canon AV-1. Not AE-1 but AV-1. After I learned how to use it I sold it because it was aperture priority only with no manual. I then bought a Contax 139 which was also aperture priority but with a manual mode.

I used to sell Nikon EM's at a Venture store back in the 1980's. The Canon AV-1 was a display model that my boss marked down to $80 to clearance it out. It even came with a flash.

 

[Alan Gales]

I always liked aperture priority unless I needed manual. I'd cradle the camera in my left hand and use my fingers to focus the lens or change the aperture dial. I'd keep my right index finger on the shutter. If I wanted a certain shutter speed then I would just spin the aperture dial to get what I wanted. It was a lot faster then taking one hand off the camera to adjust the shutter speed dial on top of the camera.

Of course you could buy an Olympus and have both aperture dial and shutter speed dial on the lens.

 

[Sirius Glass]

I worked this out a previous time when you mentioned it - see the post, #15 in this thread: Charts of Depth of field vs focal length, scaling f/#

takeaway message: If you change focal length and then move your feet so as to keep magnification (image size) constant, then the DOF remains constant.

Yes that is the result but I want to see every step of the derivation because it helps me mathematically understand the ramifications of each step.

 

[Sirius Glass]

I think by now we have established that photographic equipment, lenses, shutter priority and their combinations have moved on a bit since the 1970s...

Yes but the physics and mathematics have not changed. Even the photons without textbooks can figure out exactly what to do where they are responding to film or electro-optical focal plane. Wonders never cease!

 

[Sirius Glass]

Bokeh, to make a stab at the etymology and original use, even though the Japanese word simply means fog or haze, in photography terms it most certainly originated as an allegory of the practice of applying gradated print colour on woodblocks when printing Japanese woodblock prints.

View attachment 268267​

Above is not a wood block print (just something I had handy on my HDD), but it perfectly illustrates the principle and the Japanese sensibility for gradated colour.

Also historically, whether it's SP or AP that is easiest to implement and on whether that has any bearing on the preferred method, I think is quite undecided.
From what I can glean it's very, very close.
Even if we take into account the difference between leaf and focal plane shutter control.
Both can in principle be controlled equally easily with a simple capture the needle system. And of course if there ever was a slight difference, when you bring solenoid, voice coils and motors, in more modern cameras (70's and up) into the equation, it's very much the same.

Outside of a very few special cases, it's neigh on impossible to get an accurate impression or idea of how bokeh and DoF is going fall in the photo, by stopping down. You can get a very rough idea of what is going to be in focus, but it is rough, because of course the screen get's darker and grainier once you stop down.
Thus you are left with imagination, which no matter the experience, will not be accurate at all with all the variables. Especially where it really matters, with tele lenses that are almost fundamentally slowish in handheld versions and therefore present a darker image in the finder.

Part of my, perhaps implicit, reasoning here is that shutter priority is actually a better way of controlling aperture, than directly controlling aperture.
Most of the cameras that has SP as only program, has some accommodation for letting you know what the aperture is going to be, so it's not completely up to the camera.
This is all about speed of capture. The second you are doing something measured and precise, like a landscape or a still-life you will use a tripod and manual exposure.
SP is just a version of P (program) with a hard skewing in one direction.
Depending on the lens, you have very different possibilities WRT shutter speed. That's part of the genius behind the lens modes on the Canon T70. There is just build, in making it even easier.

Staying in the sweet zone of optimal apertures of the lens, if you are that way inclined, is also fully possible with SP.

The difference between 1.4 and 2.8 can be quite small and as said impossibly hard to judge or imagine accurately. Even harder with higher apertures like the difference between f8 and f11.
On the other hand with shutter speeds you very often have an idea of what is reasonable in a given situation, what you absolutely need or can get away with, with a given lens. And you might also have some idea, that you want a certain amount of motion blur and even camera movement blur, or contrary that it should e avoided as far as possible for that particular photo.

What I often observe with me and others, is that out of habit or laziness, that the aperture will either go to full open as default, or you will set it to optimum aperture and forget about it.
And then it will stay there, until you are forced to think about it. That will lead to suboptimal and boring photos IMO.
Not so with shutter speeds. There you are forced to think about the implications all the time.

Now, I'm not saying that AP doesn't have its place. It certainly does.
I just have come to the conclusion that it often becomes a glorified substitute for P mode, with none of the inherent variety that is build into that.

Humpf! Now you get all textbooky on us.

 

[wiltw]

Of course you could buy an Olympus and have both aperture dial and shutter speed dial on the lens.

Your post got me to thinking...

1. my first SLR was a Topcon Auto 100, it had both shutter speed and aperture concentric to the lens, and it had shutter priority automation as well as manual control with left hand
2. My 2nd and 3rd and 4th SLR were both Olympus of various generations, and all had both shutter speed and aperture concentric to the lens, and OM-4 had aperure priority automation as well as manual control with left hand
3. My first Medium Format SLR was Bronica ETRS, and its shutter control was on the left side of the body, while the aperture ring was concentric to the lens, so both could easily be controlled with left hand, and the AE-II/-III metering prism had aperture priority automation as well as manual control with left hand
4. all the various dSLR I have owned had your choice of automation, as well as manual control, and one could easily adjust aperture and shutter with right hand (and now leaving the left hand with little to do apart from supporting the lens while shooting). It really seems that dSLRs are poorly desgined from the standpoiint of splitting control functions between the two hands while actively shooting!
5. At least Canon mirrorless restores a bit of functional use back to the left hand, in the programmable control ring of RF mount. Maybe control of active AF point would be a good use for the additional control rign of RF.

As for Av vs Tv...I have a slight bias toward Av over Tv, but the choice is really dependent upon what I am shooting and what I need to control from a creative perspective. And if I need to control BOTH aperture and shutter speed I will often resort to Manual. Growing up with film (and one ISO only, unless I changed film backs with the Bronica) Auto ISO is something that simply is not done...automation of aperture and shutter and sensitivity is too much like forsaking ALL control...I might as well be in Green Box mode (shudder). I have never been able to change my way of thinking to use manual aperture and shutter, yet leave ISO under auto control...the issue of high ISO noise is simply something I cannet relinquish, control over noise.

 

[Helge]

Is there anyone who prefer shutter priority like me? I’d be interested in hearing your reasons and thoughts.

Another reason I just remembered is that on some cameras it will let you control fill flash exactly. Even without TTL.