Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1997/05/06

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Subject: Re: An excellent article!
From: pgs@thillana.lcs.mit.edu (Patrick Sobalvarro)
Date: Tue, 6 May 1997 19:11:37 -0400

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