Hi Acer,
Ok, now I see what good sky bokeh is: very soft, not at all distracting,
Yes, this way it actually adds to the quqlity of the picture because the sky
nicely blends with the leaves into a blur of pastels. Then if you look at
the other picture (i.e. "Fiery Leaves"), your eye immediately gets drawn to
the harsh blue circles on the right in the background.
Yesterday I actually dug up the packet of pictures from that session, and
saw the following results:
-There were pictures with lovely bokeh (both with and without sky in the
"background");
-There were pictures with absolutely terrible bokeh (both with and without
sky in the background);
If memory serves me right, a lot of them were taken @ 200mm f4. So what
conclusion to draw?
Well, all of a sudden when looking at these pictures yesterday it dawned
upon me; the explanation makes perfect sense, and is dead simple: it's the
combination of _distance_ between the background and the (in focus) subject,
and the actual lens used, that matters most! This sounds trivial, but it
must be this that causes the difference! In the Fiery Leaves picture the
distance between the background and foreground (i.e. the trees _behind_ the
leaves, through which the light is falling) is much bigger than the distance
between the incoming light in the Autumn's Treat picture. In the latter one,
the light is falling through leaves which are almost in the same plane as
the in focus leaves, or at least are several meters closer. This theory
seems to be confirmed by the results of other pictures of both subjects, in
which in some there's absolutely no sky visible, but one just sees similar
effects on the background (i.e. the trees behind the subject), which had
terrible bokeh in all shots where the distance is bigger than a few meters!
So, my conclusion, backed up by common sense and some circumstantial
evidence in these pictures, really is that it's the _distance_ that makes
the biggest difference in these pictures. This in itself may simply mean
that the 65-200/4 has bad bokeh when shot wide open, and that this simply is
not very much pronounced in pictures like Autumn's Treat, simply because the
distance between the in focus foreground, and the out of focus background is
not big enough to pronounce the (suspected) bad bokeh enough.
Having said this, I must add though that the out of focus leaves in the
Autumn's Treat picture are rendered very nicely and smoothly, so this still
has me puzzled a bit, and this leads me to think that factors such as lens
to subject distance might also matter. Maybe the way to get good bokeh out
of a zoom is just more unpredictable than with a prime?
Anyone else any suggestions?!?
The whole list should; what happend to the bokeh-fest ADITL?
This is one of the next TOPE events. Giles requested to postpone it a bit
until the lighting conditions are more favourable for most of us, and as
that made a lot of sense, that's what I then decided upon. :)
Cheerio!
Olafo
______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
< This message was delivered via the Olympus Mailing List >
< For questions, mailto:owner-olympus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx >
< Web Page: http://Zuiko.sls.bc.ca/swright/olympuslist.html >
|