How do I achieve this effect?

dinneenp

Hi,
Photo here.
How exactly do you achieve a photo like this/what's happening?
Is it just a matter of focusing manually extremelly short of your subject/lights?

Exif data:
Exposure 0.005 sec (1/200)
Aperture f/3.5
Focal Length 135 mm
ISO Speed 1600
Subject Distance 5.8 m
Cheers,
Pa.

oshead

dinneenp wrote: »

Is it just a matter of focusing manually extremelly short of your subject/lights?

Looks like it..... With a wide open aperture....

Tallon

It's bokeh

smelltheglove

I would assume it is just out of focus. Out of focus lights turn up like circles.

Heres an example of one I took a few years back.

AnCatDubh

Bokeh & maybe throw entirely out of focus.

They have a large focal length. Kinda low / not ultra low aperture - perhaps the lowest that the lens offered, and if they were to manually focus on something very near or not even have a near focus but just a point to focus (perhaps minimum focusing distance of the lens), then i'd expect a shot like that. The pretty traffic lights, tailing light in the background have helped enormously.

melekalikimaka

AnCatDubh wrote: »

Bokeh & maybe throw entirely out of focus.

thats it

given the distance in the frame, prob not even that wide needed

magicbastarder

'bokeh' seems to have acquired a different meaning from what i thought it had; it means the quality of the out of focus bits, rather than just meaning 'out of focus', at least how i understood it.

charybdis

dinneenp wrote: »

Is it just a matter of focusing manually extremelly short of your subject/lights?

Bingo. In this case, the lens was at f/3.5 and focused at a distance of 5.8m - far less than what I would assume the lights are - easily enough to throw distant objects significantly out-of-focus, particularly with a 135mm lens and a 5D.

magicbastarder wrote: »

'bokeh' seems to have acquired a different meaning from what i thought it had; it means the quality of the out of focus bits, rather than just meaning 'out of focus', at least how i understood it.

A good rule of thumb is: if you're going to use the term "bokeh", don't.

It has long transgressed its original meaning of something that describes a highly esoteric and specific thing into a word used to telegraph the high probability that the person using the term has no idea what it means but wants to sound like the have a technical understanding of what they're talking about.

magicbastarder

it's a bit of a chin-stroker phrase, so.

melekalikimaka

magicbastarder wrote: »

'bokeh' seems to have acquired a different meaning from what i thought it had; it means the quality of the out of focus bits, rather than just meaning 'out of focus', at least how i understood it.

i agree, i understand it as the out of focus highlights, alot believe its general 'blur', theres been enough threads on that topic, no definite answer

charybdis

magicbastarder wrote: »

it's a bit of a chin-stroker phrase, so.

Sortof. It has an actual meaning, but what it describes is so infrequently discussed that it's almost never used correctly despite the term's near-ubiquity. It's been appropriated to mean something like both shallow depth-of-field and the region of an image which is out-of-focus, but often its use doesn't even make sense in either of these contexts. It just seems to be a knee-jerk exclamation by some people when confronted with an image in which there are out-of-focus points of light.

melekalikimaka wrote: »

i agree, i understand it as the out of focus highlights, alot believe its general 'blur', theres been enough threads on that topic, no definite answer

I think there is a definite answer, and it's not "general blur" or "out of focus highlights".

AnCatDubh

semantics aside, is there evidence of bokeh in the image or is it just out of focus?

(also we should note an alternate translation, perhaps apt, for bokeh is when it gets translated to the Japanese language (iirc) where it has a meaning of idiot/eejit/gobsh**e/<<insert other similar term of general abuse>> :eek: I heard it on a podcast and the podcast came from the internet so it must be true )

magicbastarder

AnCatDubh wrote: »

semantics aside, is there evidence of bokeh in the image or is it just out of focus?

you can't separate the two. bokeh, as it originally meant anyway, is the quality of the blur. so if there's any part of the image out of focus, there's bokeh, be it good bokeh or bad bokeh.

melekalikimaka

magicbastarder wrote: »

you can't separate the two.

but they are two different things?

magicbastarder

one is a quality of the other. so yes, they are different things, but they cannot be separated; you can't say 'yes, the image is out of focus, but there's no bokeh'.

charybdis

AnCatDubh wrote: »

semantics aside, is there evidence of bokeh in the image or is it just out of focus?

A similar question would be "is there evidence of colour rendition in the image?" There are colours in the image so I guess in a way there must be, but the question itself doesn't really make sense.

"Bokeh" isn't something that is or isn't present in an image, it is a term used to describe the way in which something happens (the way in which a lens renders the blur distribution of the out-of-focus portions of an image).

AnCatDubh wrote: »

(also we should note an alternate translation, perhaps apt, for bokeh is when it gets translated to the Japanese language (iirc) where it has a meaning of idiot/eejit/gobsh**e/<<insert other similar term of general abuse>> :eek: I heard it on a podcast and the podcast came from the internet so it must be true )

Apparently, it comes from the Japanese term for "blurry" or "fuzzy" which is also used to describe senility.

melekalikimaka wrote: »

but they are two different things?

In the same way colours and colour rendition are two different things. They are related concepts and one necessitates the presence of the other, but they're not the same thing.

magicbastarder

melekalikimaka wrote: »

theres been enough threads on that topic

maybe we should shake hands and leave this for another day, so.

melekalikimaka

charybdis wrote: »

In the same way colours and colour rendition are two different things. They are related concepts and one necessitates the presence of the other, but they're not the same thing.

then again it depends what two things your comparing, I'm distingushing the difference between oof highlights and blur, you can have blur without oof highlights, not the other way i guess

charybdis

melekalikimaka wrote: »

then again it depends what two things your comparing, I'm distingushing the difference between oof highlights and blur, you can have blur without oof highlights, not the other way i guess

Yes, but it doesn't refer to just the rendition of out-of-focus highlights. Why would you treat out-of-focus highlights differently to out-of-focus midtones or shadows and at what point does a highlight become a midtone?

melekalikimaka

charybdis wrote: »

Yes, but it doesn't refer to just the rendition of out-of-focus highlights. Why would you treat out-of-focus highlights differently to out-of-focus midtones or shadows and at what point does a highlight become a midtone?

i conisder bokeh the shaped oof highlights caused by the diaphragm of the aperture rings

charybdis

melekalikimaka wrote: »

i conisder bokeh the shaped oof highlights caused by the diaphragm of the aperture rings

I don't. I don't think it applies to just the highlights and I don't think the shape of the aperture diaphragm is particularly important to it.

You still haven't said why it applies to only the highlights or what you classify as highlights for these purposes.

Promac

When image blur is used as an effect (to enhance the foreground subject or just for its own sake) bokeh is the measure of how pleasing the result is. If it's pleasing then it's good bokeh but if it's not pleasing then it's bad bokeh.

The shape of any lights in the blurred area is one (very subjective) measure of how pleasing the effect will be overall - not the whole effect itself.

melekalikimaka

charybdis wrote: »

I don't. I don't think it applies to just the highlights and I don't think the shape of the aperture diaphragm is particularly important to it.

You still haven't said why it applies to only the highlights or what you classify as highlights for these purposes.

I would consider the rest 'blur' tbh.

melekalikimaka

Promac wrote: »

When image blur is used as an effect (to enhance the foreground subject or just for its own sake) bokeh is the measure of how pleasing the result is. If it's pleasing then it's good bokeh but if it's not pleasing then it's bad bokeh.

The shape of any lights in the blurred area is one (very subjective) measure of how pleasing the effect will be overall - not the whole effect itself.

I think from what i looked into on the topic that thats also a fair use of the work bokeh, but imo its a disambiguation thats getting pushed to the point where I see images that are just blurry and people consider it 'bokehlicious'. like the bokeh thread afew months back

charybdis

Promac wrote: »

When image blur is used as an effect (to enhance the foreground subject or just for its own sake) bokeh is the measure of how pleasing the result is. If it's pleasing then it's good bokeh but if it's not pleasing then it's bad bokeh.

The shape of any lights in the blurred area is one (very subjective) measure of how pleasing the effect will be overall - not the whole effect itself.

No. When people talk about it being subjective, this is not what they mean (or at least, it's not what they should mean).

melekalikimaka wrote: »

I would consider the rest 'blur' tbh.

Why don't you consider the highlights "blur"?

melekalikimaka

charybdis wrote: »

No. When people talk about it being subjective, this is not what they mean (or at least, it's not what they should mean).



Why don't you consider the highlights "blur"?

its a defined shape caused by the diaphragm... nothing ambiguous about the highlights imo.

i keep saying imo as its just what i think, never said it was right

101001

woah! I normally associate blur with movement... Bokeh still exists even if it cant be seen... Highlight merely pronounces bokeh... right?

charybdis

melekalikimaka wrote: »

its a defined shape caused by the diaphragm... nothing ambiguous about the highlights imo.

So why do different lenses have different bokeh when used wide open (i.e.: with a circular aperture diaphragm, or more correctly, without the presence of an aperture diaphragm)?

melekalikimaka wrote: »

i keep saying imo as its just what i think, never said it was right

You can keep insisting that black is white too, but it doesn't mean you're correct.

5uspect

I would have called it an out of focus circle of confusion.

101001

charybdis wrote: »

So why do different lenses have different bokeh when used wide open (i.e.: with a circular aperture diaphragm, or more correctly, without the presence of an aperture diaphragm)?

Its got to do with the makeup of the glass... that's one parameter definitely

melekalikimaka

charybdis wrote: »

So why do different lenses have different bokeh when used wide open (i.e.: with a circular aperture diaphragm, or more correctly, without the presence of an aperture diaphragm)?
.

i assume its down the the element construction and how the light is refracted inside once the blades recede.

I'm not saying i'm correct, I'm saying from what i have read on the topic, this is what i concluded was the meaning

DaireQuinlan

Hey, I have a 35mm lense for my cropped format dslr this is really a 50mm lense right ? Also I've heard you get more DOF with a cropped format camera.

melekalikimaka

it is all rather pointless

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l74083zafAM

NothingMan

It can be a nice effect. No idea why I like this, was just messing around with a new lens but I like it.

punchdrunk

I can't even feckin pronounce it!

I do believe the number of aperture blades,and even the blade shape plays a part

it's nicely done,but it's a bit like fisheye to me,it's rather too easy to over use it

charybdis

101001 wrote: »

Its got to do with the makeup of the glass... that's one parameter definitely

Yeah, but I think it has more to do with the shape and arrangement of the elements within the lens.

melekalikimaka wrote: »

i assume its down the the element construction and how the light is refracted inside once the blades recede.

I'm not saying i'm correct, I'm saying from what i have read on the topic, this is what i concluded was the meaning

My point was that the shape of the blur circles will be identical when the aperture diaphragm isn't engaged meaning, according to your definition of the shape of out-of-focus highlights caused by the aperture diaphragm, that the two lenses will be identical.

DaireQuinlan wrote: »

lense

This is the mark of well-crafted satire.

DaireQuinlan

charybdis wrote: »

This is the mark of well-crafted satire.

It's the subtle touches