Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1997/05/06
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]I went out in search of the latest Photo Techniques to find the "bokeh" article mentioned by other LUG members, and I was struck by two things: 1) the local bookstores also carry a British magazine called "Photo Technique" which seems to be as much a rag as "Popular Photography," which is to say, quite different from "Photo Techniques" 2) The articles about "bokeh" seemed to take the slant that this was something only the Japanese knew about To elaborate further on point 2, although the articles admitted that older German lenses are those most admired by Japanese "bokeh" enthusiasts, there was no discussion of how this might have come about. The notion that the older German lenses had been designed to have pleasing "bokeh" was not raised -- instead, there are various paragraphs about how it was natural that the Japanese would be the ones to pay attention to "bokeh" and Westerners would not, because the Japanese have a tradition of aesthetics and pay attention to negative space. Did anyone else feel that these articles treated the practice of paying attention to the way in which a lens renders out-of-focus portions of an image as a recent Japanese innovation? - -Patrick