At 09:46 AM 6/19/2000 -0400, you wrote:
>thanks - I had gotten most of that by reading in to the posts, but not so
>clear. Is "bokeh" a made-up word or does it have real language origins?
Hi Wayne:
We've been told on a number of occasions that it has the straightforward
translation of "blur" from the original Japanese. Nobody really seems to
like this, since "blur" is never used as a word-for-word translation
("How's the blur of this lens?").
We may not have in English a word with the connotations that "bokeh" has in
Japanese, not that I pretend to know what these might be.
The concept of bokeh as an optical/phenomenological desirable originates in
Japan I think (but again don't really know). Does anyone know if there was
ever similar discussion of the out of focus qualities of lenses in, say,
Germany? If so, what are the concept words? Indirectly, the F64/Northern
California photographers rejected the bokeh-phenomenon as a desideratum in
photography, but this was with reference to the early 20th century
painterly emphasis in portraiture -- an aesthetic rejection of soft
focusing and shallow DOF -- not to the characteristics of lens construction
and performance.
More than you wanted to know, and almost no real knowledge in it. :/
Joel Wilcox
Iowa City, Iowa USA
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