Chris_Malcolm
Mallard with 135mm STF
Took the new (used) STF for a walk in the Botanic Garden. This purely manual lens was designed specifically to give excellent smoothly faded bokeh with no false detail (such as sharp edges on iris-shaped out of focus highlights) without compromising in-focus image quality. In the right circumstances this is claimed to give a better impression of three dimensional depth to an image.
This is unfamiliar photographic territory for me. I've been more of a documentary photographer usually going for widest depth of field. I've often used differential focus to isolate a subject by throwing background out of focus, but have paid little attention to the quality of the "bokeh". There is so much revoltingly ignorant & pretentious nonsense talked about "bokeh" that I've shied away from it in disgust. But it's not all nonsense. I do have the lens with the worst bokeh in the world, a Newtonian reflex mirror lens. That has a doughnut shaped aperture which produces sharp edged doughnuts of confusion instead of discs. Blurred lines become smeared doubled images. Not always obvious, but very nasty in the worst circumstances.
So I'm hoping to get some experimental tutoring in "bokeh" from this lens.
This duck certainly has an impressive spatially situated solidity!
Original: DSC01623X
Mallard with 135mm STF
Took the new (used) STF for a walk in the Botanic Garden. This purely manual lens was designed specifically to give excellent smoothly faded bokeh with no false detail (such as sharp edges on iris-shaped out of focus highlights) without compromising in-focus image quality. In the right circumstances this is claimed to give a better impression of three dimensional depth to an image.
This is unfamiliar photographic territory for me. I've been more of a documentary photographer usually going for widest depth of field. I've often used differential focus to isolate a subject by throwing background out of focus, but have paid little attention to the quality of the "bokeh". There is so much revoltingly ignorant & pretentious nonsense talked about "bokeh" that I've shied away from it in disgust. But it's not all nonsense. I do have the lens with the worst bokeh in the world, a Newtonian reflex mirror lens. That has a doughnut shaped aperture which produces sharp edged doughnuts of confusion instead of discs. Blurred lines become smeared doubled images. Not always obvious, but very nasty in the worst circumstances.
So I'm hoping to get some experimental tutoring in "bokeh" from this lens.
This duck certainly has an impressive spatially situated solidity!
Original: DSC01623X