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 p.39 #17 · which lens has the most 3D POP? | |
Sauseschritt wrote:
For the record, I do not consider an image with extremely shallow depth of field to be much more than a geeky experiment, typically with a result that has no actual worth of any kind. No newspaper, no magazine of any variant, no art gallery and no other source is interested in such images, except other photography geeks, and they wont pay you either.
To me, 3D pop is if you can "walk into a scene", as it happends especially with certain medium and large format lenses. Specifically it also doesnt require that you use the lens wide open either. We had examples for this in this thread before.
Also, there is definitely the problem of too shallow depth of field. Like the many many head portraits you can find on the net in which one eye is sharp and in focus, and the other is already substantly blurred by a definitely *too* shallow depth of field. Such images are really mostly irritating to look at. You usually want ALL of the subject in focus, and the subject in this case is the whole face, and certainly both eyes. While a certain amount of blurr is of course unavoiable if the eyes are not on the same focus plane, and the amount of blurr that is still tolerable is subjective, it definitely not desireable to have too much shallow depth of field.
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philip_pj wrote:
As with myself, you are fighting a losing battle. We all like tasteful and appropriate out-of-focus content and sometimes the composition will require a lot of back separation - as in a lot of street images and found portraits.
But nothing succeeds like excess, does it? If a little is good, more must be better. And the industry has a boatload of very fast, very expensive, very high profit lenses to sell, and they pay some people a lot of money to make sure the shallow DOF concept is front and centre.
They actually convinced users that unsharp, totally diffused backgrounds are more important than the content these images discard, to the point the OOF invades the actual subject! (soft ears, hair etc.) Scores of reviewers actually rate bokeh as 'better' if it is totally undefined and has very soft round artefacts.
Mission accomplished. Many portraits now resemble those bird crops in the tele lens threads. And think of this: an image with a rich, informative background will hold the viewer's eye much longer than one with 15% of sharp content surrounded totally by goop.
It's such a formula. It's also hard to see why people don't see value in 'content bokeh', the soft, shaped outlines of identifiable image motifs that help the image to tell a story and give it more depth (image-wise and content as well), but it seems like shouting in the wilderness. So I don't do that anymore (this time being an exception)....Show more →
I agree with you guys 100%, but at the same time I like shooting full body portraits, or portraits from an even longer distance. Lens speed and good focus transition rendering sure helps a lot with that, just to get some separation.
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