Re: [Leica] to all japanese speakers

[tom <thomas@bigdayphoto.com>]

Hi, I'm a recently signed-on lurker, thinking about getting into
rangefinders to supplement my Pentax SLR's.

This is something Mike Johnston, former editor of Photo Techniques,
posted to the PDML a while back regarding bokeh:

Mike Johnston wrote:
> 
> Bird wrote:
> 
> > Mates,
> > I already saw this word come out of the discussion twice. what
> > does it mean?
> > thanks,
> 
> I should probably answer, since I take modest credit for having helped
> introduce the word to photographers in the West. The word means "blur." I
> commissioned and published three articles about bokeh in the March 1997
> _PHOTO Techniques_ (an issue that is long sold out, despite the fact that
> very few issues of PT ever sell out), "What Is Bokeh?" by John Kennerdell,
> "Notes on the Terminology of Bokeh" by Oren Grad, and "A Technical Analysis
> of Bokeh" by Harold Merklinger.
> 
> John is a wandering photographer who left America for Asia as a young man
> and has stayed away for decades; he is based in Bangkok and authored, among
> other things, the best-selling English guidebook for Japan. Oren is a
> high-level science and medical policy analyst in Cambridge who has multiple
> advanced degrees and speaks many languages, including Japanese (and who,
> although he photographs mainly with a Leica M6 with the rare, 1st-version
> 35mm Aspherical Summilux and a customized antique whole-plate camera, is a
> great fan of Pentax and a walking encyclopaedia of Pentaxiana). Harold is a
> high-ranking scientist with the Canadian defence [sic] establishment who
> specializes in acoustics but loves photographic optics.
> 
> The concept had been common in Japan for some time, but it was modestly
> revolutionary to many American photographers in 1997; the idea is simply
> that lenses render the out-of-focus areas differently, and this might be
> analyzed as part of a lens test in addition to analyzing the in-focus
> rendition. Before our articles, the word was more properly romanized as
> bo-ke or "boke," as if it rhymed with "toke" or "bloke," which is wrong--it
> comes from the two katakana characters for bo and ke, bo as in bone and ke
> as in Kenneth, pronounced with equal stress on both; so for our articles I
> decided to add an "h" to it and write it as one word.
> 
> The artcles caused a minor sensation in our esoteric little corner of the
> world (meaning, among those who care about photographic techniques). Web
> searches for the word in the months that followed publication would yield
> hundreds of references from all over creation. Interestingly, the idea
> offended a lot of photographers, who considered that pictures should be
> sharp, the sharp parts are the important parts, and it was somehow
> subversive or pinko or touchy-feely to point out that the way a lens renders
> blur has an aesthetic effect on some pictures.
> 
> Amusingly, in Japanese, "bo-ke," which means more or less simply "blur,"
> also has a secondary definition of "fuzzy in the head," said of one who's
> not quite with it. <g>
> 
> What is true for me, and has been true for many people I've talked to, is
> that once you start looking at the way lenses render the blur in pictures,
> you'll never be able to ignore it again. It's what led me to Pentax, for one
> thing.
> 
> --Mike