[Leica] Bokeh - proven myth ? My goodness not again? ;-)

[Ted Grant <tedgrant@shaw.ca>]

Henry Ting wrote:

>This is going to be controversial. I read about a lot of Leica lens
offering a distinct "Bokeh" image >that's missing from lens of other  makes.
I was confused as to how could this be possible,
>unless outside of physics' existentialism, Leica lens have a metaphysical
spirit that the likes of >Nikon or Zeiss lack.
>To prove my point, I did some experiment.<<<<<<

Hi Henry,
Well lad if you want to see controversial I'd think your first test trip
would be to the LUG archives and look at the, what I'm sure must be in the
high hundreds of posts covering the "horrors of bokeh" and the hours of
testing many before you have done, which basically hasn't made a whit of
difference to taking, " better pictures!"

In a career of now just over 50 years of published photography, it wasn't
until about 45 years into the profession did I ever hear of bokeh and that
was right here on the LUG.  Much to my amazement I never knew all those
years that the out of focus part of the picture was so very important to the
success of the photograph.

I mean back around '97 some of the lads here almost came to key board blows
over the subject, great hours of wasted time was hammered out day after day
and many of us sat in wonderment at the posts flying back and forth over
this very inane bit of "scientific goobly bokeh gook" that's never made one
of my pictures get published.

I can just imagine returning to the office with an incredible fire
photograph and putting the picture in front of the picture editor then rave
about the "bokeh!"  The editor would immediately think I'd been inhaling way
too much smoke from the fire and throw me out.

A couple of things, and I know some lads like to know all this techie stuff
and that's all well and good. However lad, may I suggest you save a ton of
time and film and testing and all that high end scientific stuff and just go
read the archives.

Secondly, the first thing you did that could be construed as a major mistake
on the LUG, is come in with a heavy duty test thing on the bokehie stuff
before reading the archives and then telling everyone your test was going to
be controversial, jeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesh cool man! :-) A real attention getter.
:-)

But a tiny word of advice from the old lad, load your camera go out and have
much more fun taking pictures and forget all this bokeh stuff..  You'll feel
better, we all get more sleep and more pictures taken ourselves.

So now be a good lad, go run a search for bokeh in the archives and have a
wild time reading all those scary old stories written by witches and
warlocks creating the strangest boooooooookeh you've ever seen. :-)

And lad, don't take me too seriously, as I just like to get on folks about
strange technical things that have absolutely nothing to do with the success
of the content of the photograph, which after all is the most important part
of any photograph any time. Or that's what I've understood for quite a
number of years.
ted

Ted Grant Photography Limited
www.islandnet.com/~tedgrant

- --
To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html