Re: An excellent article!

["Jeff Segawa" <segawa@netone.com>]

On Tue, May 6, 1997 4:11 PM, Patrick Sobalvarro
<mailto:pgs@thillana.lcs.mit.edu> wrote: 
>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?

Well, that the terminology is all Japanese is interesting. But I don't know
if this is so much due to a lack of perception elsewhere in the world
(heck, many Chinese images are dominated by negative space), or rather, due
to the fact that a lot of magazines published in No. America and the UK are
lean on content, sometimes being little more than a vehicle for showcasing
of goods and services in an upbeat, uncritical manner. I suspect that
matters such as bokeh, just as with "transparency" and "spatial coherence"
in hifi, require a relatively sophisticated and critically demanding
audience to find widespread acceptance, and this takes time to find it's
way into the larger media-driven consciousness, starting first with the
tinier, more obscure publications, at least in the US.

I also note that the Japanese market for periodicals appears to be somewhat
different, with a rather staggering number of titles offered, covering all
manner of subject matter, and often, at a cost much higher than we are
accustomed--yet evidently, the market supports such. I once picked up a
rather amazing automobile magazine in Osaka which had lots of coverage on
the Mini Cooper and Lotus Seven! Another, aimed at railfans, invariably
showed photos of the couplers and restrooms in various passenger trains,
presumably for the sake of modelling. I would not be surprised to learn of
a $15-20 glossy magazine on Zeiss and Leica cameras or vintage US and UK
hifi gear.

So no, I think it's nonsense to say that bokeh is something only
comprehensible to Japanese, but Japanese magazines seem to have popularized
the concept and given a vocabulary to the phenomena.