She says 1.4 bohka "is the best". ----

"Wenn ich Bokeh höre ... entsichere ich meinen Browning!"

- Unknown photographer from 20th century.

Dali said:

"Wenn ich Bokeh höre ... entsichere ich meinen Browning!"

- Unknown phorographer from 20th century.

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(When I hear the word "bokeh" I grab my Browning" - one can only hope it's the m1919 .50 cal. )
"Mit der dummheit, kampfen Goetter selbst vergebens"


-Schiller.

Thomas Bertilsson said:

OK. I'll just suck it up then... haha

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Indeed.

Why, not being able to talk was the least of my troubles. I couldn't stand or walk, I couldn't even crawl. And I crapped all over myself several times a day.

DoF is mainly an afterthought for my 35mm photography, but figures in heavily with my medium format stuff. Probably due to using an RF for almost all my 35 work now and I am used to composing with the entire finder "in focus". I think SLRs encourage "bokeh"-laden photographs because they throw it in your face from the get-go. A teacher I had in college referred to the fad of taking out of focus pictures of lights and other nonsense not as photographs of a subject in front of your lens, but as photographs of your lens.

When I say it figures into my medium format work, it means I generally work at whatever aperture allows me to set my Hasselblad at 1/125 or 1/250 in whatever light I happen to be shooting in, and I have to take the DoF on the focusing screen into account at that point. "Bokeh" for me, when it isn't an ancillary characteristic of whatever settings I have decided to use, is there to serve one purpose, that is to juxtapose hard and soft edges in the photograph.

case in point:

I think one of the reasons this bokeh stupidity annoys me so is my use of large format. When your standard lens is 300 or 360mm, you have to work to place the plane of focus where it belongs. Using a 300mm lens, standard on 8x10, f:32 gives about the same DoF as f:5.6 on a 50mm standard lens with 35mm. F:1.4 translates to about f:8 on the 300, which is generally considered by most experienced LF user to be unuseably shallow DoF for most scenes.
On the positive side, LF lenses are "straight" lenses, no telephoto or retrofocal jiggery-pokery is applied except for some few extreme WA designs. This helps give them a smoother rendering of OOFAs.
And if you want to see what beautiful rendering of OOFAs is all about, pick up a 100 year old Dagor and use it a f:22. Smoothness that tiny format lenses can only fantasize about...