Sooner or later, almost all serious photographers come to grips with the question of image sharpness. To try to update it a bit, I’ve added new illustrations and captions.

After years of hobbyist fascination with ultra-shallow focus (which is not at all what this piece was about), it's amusing to see how exotic the whole subject must have sounded two decades ago. So please enjoy the following as mainly a historical curiosity. But plenty of amateur photographers apparently still felt uncomfortable on the subject of blur rather than sharpness, a concern you can see reflected in the cautious way I wrote my article. Professionals, whether in commercial photography, fashion, or cinema, had paid attention to the defocused parts of their images pretty much since the beginning. The concept itself was anything but new, even in the West. And so a new English word was born, and it was the word that created the buzz. For simplicity I dropped the aji, as the Japanese themselves often do, and Mike added a final 'h' to make it clear that the word had two syllables. (The best translation, in my opinion, came years later from Adobe: 'lens blur.') Mike's editorial instincts, however, proved right.

If it had been up to me I might have mentioned the Japanese term once but then called it something in English. I'd been in Japan since my student days and had learned most of my photography there, so the subject was certainly a familiar one. Actually, he replied, I was hoping you'd write it. Great, I said, I look forward to reading it. He announced that he wanted to do a piece on it. Oren Grad and I pointed out that the Japanese had a term for it: boke aji, literally, the 'flavor of the blur.' That seemed to grab the attention of the magazine's editor, a fellow called Mike Johnston. Introduction, 2017: Thank us or blame us, the notorious b-word first came to the West in a feature in the May/June 1997 issue of Photo Techniques magazine, following a discussion on out-of-focus lens character on the old Compuserve Photoforum. Turner.' In 'Legend,' the following year, he switched to Cooke S4s, a more modern design that nevertheless carries on the 'Cooke look'-warm and rounded with notably smooth out-of-focus rendering. In 2014 Pope evidently went through just about every lens at a large London rental house before settling on some old Cooke Speed Panchros for his brilliantly photographed 'Mr. A still from 'Legend' (2015), Dick Pope, director of photography.

Rain japan bokeh