(no subject)

[piranha]

Comments

[dimitar]

That's a nice one! Spring is almost here.
The background is a bit too busy for my taste though :)

[piranha]

*nod*. for me too, but i didn't feel like replacing it in photoshop. the dailies are more to show what i see than to present images that are as perfect as possible.

[graydon]

That is some damn fine bokeh, and I really like the flower.

[piranha]

you know, i don't really understand why people get all excited about bokeh. explain?

[graydon]

I have no understanding of why people get excited about bokeh; I especially have no understanding of the now old and certainly complex Japanese aesthetic surrounding the subject.

For myself, I like this bokeh because of three things.

The perceptual depth of the flower in the image varies based on which horizontal third of the picture one looks at; I consider the effect not so much floating in space as an impression of ubiquity, and think it goes well with flowers.

The transitions in the bokeh are smooth; since there's effectively nothing in the foreground, and the background is busy, the effect is to both subdue a lot of perceptual mass to keep it from overshadowing the flower, create a sense of order from the ordering-by-distance effect of the blur, and to perceptually de-saturate the background a little, setting off the red of the flower more strongly. (All of this contributes to what I see as a strong sense of place; that is a nice sort of contrast with something as inherently ephemeral as a flower.)

The most distant half of the background is sufficiently blurred that I can't confidently tell what it is, but it's in large enough blocks of colour and pattern that I can see things in it.

[piranha]

thanks, that makes sense to me. i think i've been trying to understand this from way too technical an angle; probably because the references at which i looked when i first heard the word were very technical.

now to read up on the japanese background.

[graydon]

I cannot myself generally make head nor tail nor count of feet out of technical discussion of bokeh, which I think -- stress thing -- conflate a descriptive terminology with an aesthetic one.

I tend to go with "I think that looks nice" and then try to figure out how to articulate why I think that. There does seem to be some commonality to why I think that, so perhaps the aesthetic terminology types are on to something.

[bcholmes]

I do love your photos.

[piranha]

thank you!