Image Quality....

Image Quality for lack of a better word...I have been of the mind set that a image on a professional level should be sharp through out....I had a image that was really nice but some of the flowers in the fore ground blurred so i didnt waste my time with it...Another that has a bird flying through and the bird is slightly blurred thus again i didnt do anything with it but i love the picture.

I happened to stop by some folks house that live down the road. Really nice English couple and they invited me in for dinner. His wife knew i was a photographer and she got one of her favorite books it was a book of Ireland by this one photographer. As i was turning the pages i found this one image where the grass in the direct foreground was all blurry yet all else was in focus. The image was in his book so one would think this was very acceptable and the quality in the book of the images was very good.

Blur is acceptable but to a certain extent and in certain places and what i hope is to get some input from Asher and others as to whats acceptable....I know theres no set rule.I'll send Asher a couple of images that maybe he can post to this tread and i can get some feed back on those. I know too that blur can be the desired effect.

Selective focus is one of the strong elements of composition and the ability to do so is one of the features of a larger sensor/film size.

In macro photography, it is almost impossible to acheive sharpness through out the image, so deciding what should be in focus, and capturing that, is one of the great challenges.

Sharpness through out should not be a determining factor in deciding if an image is worth keeping. Sharpness where you want it sharp, should be.

ErikJonas said:

I know too that blur can be the desired effect.

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Blur is only a means to an end!

Whenever I shoot an image, I'm pretty clear about what reaction/emotion I want to achieve with it. Blur will usually be a means to draw attention on the focused parts of the image, 99.8% of the time, selective focus is an instrument. On very rare occasions the blur itself will be the goal I'm after (e.g. to keep the viewer guessing, or keep him/her from getting distracted by details that don't matter IMO).

Cheers,
Bart

Charles L Webster said:

Selective focus is one of the strong elements of composition and the ability to do so is one of the features of a larger sensor/film size.

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Erik,

Charles just about sums it up perfectly.

We have a lot of tools at our disposal in photography and a bunch of ideas, concepts notions in our mind's eye. The challenge in photography is to deliver with our minds eye. That means only including what is needed for that. One way of putting less attention on part of the entire field of view, (that the lens gets light from), is to have those lesser elements out of focus or else blurred. There are two processes that are related. The longer the lens and wider the aperture, the more it will render objects, (not in the exact plane of focus), into a blurred state. This gives more attention to the object of interest while the other forms are drawn in a gentle manner that adds charm to the entire picture, as if it were a setting for a jewel in a fairy cobweb.

Asher

Hi Erik,

For me blur is everything. It sets the mood, focusses the viewers attentions, removes uninteresting objects and more than anything else its gives an image a certain soul.

It's so important to my photography that I don't own a lens with an aperture smaller than 2.8, and a have a nice selection of primes that open further than that.

Tim

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Well i sent Asher a image,hopefully he can get it posted here its of a bench with blackberries....The image is pretty much crap, i thought it looked interesting at first but have come not to like it...Anyway...The fore ground as you will notice is not sharp. This is not doing the image any favors and would be best in focus...

Image to appear when Asher does lol...Thanks Asher....

Hi Erik

Don't be afraid of blur - either motion or just a lack of depth of focus. Both can be used creatively either to highlight a particular subject or to deconstruct a scene or just to create a sense of motion. Even just a general feeling of what the photographer is about can be created by blur.

It helps if you get the blur you want, but sometimes happy accidents are good too!

Mike



A couple of examples, both copyright Mike Shimwell, and accepting that they may not be to your taste, but both achieved all I wanted from the situation:

on my tree photographs shot with large format, I actually kind of like having the background a little bit out of focus. Not usually alot out of focus, but just softer than the main subject tree, it makes the tree pop out just a bit

If you like everything sharp all the time, that's fine. But I don't think it always needs to be that way

I see the foreground is soft. So you are using some soft focus effect, but what does it bring you of value. My concern here is that there is detail at the base of the wall that's more interesting. If that is not important, it should be OOF too, darker or both. In fact I wonder why we can't see more of the wall and it's patina and a larger extent of the broken plaster. As it is, I don't get the picture.


Asher

Asher Kelman said:

Erik Jonas: Bench with Blackberries​

I see the foreground is soft. So you are using some soft focus effect, but what does it bring you of value.

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I think the bottom of the image still has too much focus, and that shows the optical limitations in a bokeh quality that draws too much attention.

Personally I would have cropped differently in the viewfinder, e.g. a landscape orientation roughly like the top half of this image, with a bit more of the right side of the bench.

Cheers,
Bart