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Wheres me damn 35mm!

Gary,

what if anything can be done to minimise poor bokeh
Shoot both lenses at f/8 to f/11 -- no out-of-focus elements, no bokeh to fret about.

Joe
 
Vuk's approach to photgraphy has always been more than somewhat "painterly" so his bad bokeh experience makes perfect sense to me -- its not hard to imagine how a painting can be completely ruined by a small but obvious daub of the wrong colour in the wrong place for exmaple.

Having said that, I do think Vuk's advice is not the most appropriate for Gary. If you must do a music analogy then Gary would be reading Bert Wheedon's "A Tune a Day" and Vuk would be Dave Gilmour ctelling him he needs to learn this really subtle hammer on pull off double string bend technique and slip it in somewhere around the 8min mark of his second solo and the 20 min alobum closing track.

Also this allows uis to compare Vuk to Fat Dave Gilmour whihc is amusing in it's own right :)

Matthew
 
Would this bad bokeh be indicative of the particular lenses I have picked up? Or have I picked up some dodgy ones?

Its no matter, I am pleased with them and have come to accept that I am just a 'dabbler' these lenses seem appropriate. Once I am able to picture pretty naked women and urban downtown scenes then perhaps I'll look at something else.

Sigh.
 
garyi said:
. Once I am able to picture pretty naked women and urban downtown scenes then perhaps I'll look at something else.

I can picture the former without a camera of any sort!
 
hehe, yes indeed.

I must admit the whole thing is pretty overwhelming, its hard to know how you could produce an interesting shot without feeling its all been done before.
 
Your lenses are absolutely fine iGary. Bokeh is a relatively specialised feature, relevant only when you're using wide apertures (f/1.8 or 2.0 on yours) and using very specific focusing techniques. Like Joe said, stick the aperture on f/8 and it's a non-issue - pretty much everything's in focus anyway.

I use f/11 all the time with my Nikon 24mm lens, and keep focus manually on about 2 metres. That way, everything from about 1 metre to infinity is in focus, which is entirely appropriate for the way and what I shoot:

http://guybatey.com/photographs_1.htm

If you get seriously into low-light (or available light) portraiture, you may start to think about how the background can blur pleasingly, but it's really not an issue at the moment.

Someone who uses wonderfully subtle portrait lighting is the Observer's Jane Bown. She's used an Olympus OM-1 and a 50mm f/1.8 lens with available light only for over 40 years, normally stuck on f/2.8 and 125th. Look at:

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/page/0,11821,1009693,00.html

Click on the Flash link.
 
garyi said:
hehe, yes indeed.

I must admit the whole thing is pretty overwhelming, its hard to know how you could produce an interesting shot without feeling its all been done before.

My earliest efforts with a 'proper' camera were B&W shots of abandoned churches/chapels in Mid-Wales. No-one else would be sad enough to photograph them! I also took some panoramic shots of London from Greenwich Park, which have historic interest because they were taken just before Canary Wharf was built. I never bothered my head about any of this 'bokeh' malarkey either.
 
garyi,
I bet their are not too many photo competitions that have 'bokeh' as a category heading so why bother entering those as I'm sure Vuk will win them all without too much trouble. You concentrate on other categories and just keep clicking away at whatever catches your eye.
 
matthewr said:
its not hard to imagine how a painting can be completely ruined by a small but obvious daub of the wrong colour in the wrong place for exmaple.
But the painting clearly isn't completely ruined if all the people who see it think it's "the most maginficent thing they had ever seen".

Michael.
 
i think most of you are failing to understand. in my failed picture, 80% of the shot is out-of-focus, so bokeh becomes a very dominant element, not just one or two "bum notes" in a song. the entire balance of the shot and its visual impact rely on it. instead of something smooth, delicate and flowing, i got busy angular fuzz that dominates the shot.

i think what may be throwing people off is that i pointed to just one small area in gary's 35mm pics as an example. the was just to pin-point ONE "objective" characteristic. the entire photo is not ruined by the poor performance of the lens, although it isn't helped either. in the 50mm shot of the barbed wired, the entire background is simply atrocious, but the deails are so small it would be difficult to dissect the details for purposes of illustration.

as for tony's comments about how lack of sharpness, blur and distortion can produce nifty artistic effects. i agree! bad bokeh, however, is simply (and always) annoying.

vuk.
 
I had another go around the area, the problem is not so pronounced around a setting aperture 11 so I think using it in A mode may help in these circumstances.
 
I wonder as well if having the camera set to 'sharpen' is not helping matters. I'll switch that off.
 
igary.

you should turn off ALL enhancements the camera does in-house and fiddle only with photoshop. next, you sould have the thing set the "M" mode. otehrwise, i will be right over to confiscate it.

being forced to use a lens at f/11 is absurd, IMO. see my new thread for an alternative.

vuk.
 
I do use M mostly to be fair P mode seems to screw everything up usually. I only use P if its an over in a flash situation.
 
do you have a proper light meter?

cinemasupplies_1889_46867324

(not my photo)

vuk.
 
guybat said:
Jane Bown doesn't use a light meter:

....

She just meters the light reflected off the back of her hand. I'll try it tomorrow,
and see how it works.

well, then she does use a light meter. the shitty one inside her camera

jane brown doesn't even know how to hold a camera properly:

jb.jpg


regardless, relected light reading will ALWAYS be inferior to incident readings. there is no debate here: one measures the real thing, the other measures an approximation of it.

vuk.
 
garyi - for inspiration, do a Google on Wolfgang Tillmans and then click on images and have a look through - see what you think.

He's managed an impressive career capturing the very very ordinary, but in an interesting and quite original way, and for someone that feels that great photographic subjects don't come their way, he may be a help. Good books available from Taschen & the Tate.

Socks rolled up on a sofa, a bunch of keys in the back of a door , a pair of jeans on the end of the stairs - not to mention pics of food!!. Sometimes, he actually even manages to come close to a different way of seeing, by being able to dodge outside the western conventions of composition and what makes a picture 'good' - which is a very difficult thing to do, especially if you've had any sort of art training, which presumably he has. Also, I don't think he would know what bokeh was if it bit him on the bum.

You don't have to do the knob pics though.

I wouldn't mean to condescend for a minute, but I do think that the quality of your pictures has really come on since you first began posting them on the Naim forum a couple of years ago. I particularly liked the one that comes up as 'tree50' if you check properties, in this thread. Lovely light, and open to all sorts of poncy interpretations.


palp
 
palpnorte said:
garyi - for inspiration, do a Google on Wolfgang Tillmans and then click on images and have a look through - see what you think.

here's the first picture of his i found:

im00204.jpg

TITLE: Alex with cock plant, 1992

i think it's crap.

vuk.
 


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