08-11-2011, 07:23 AM
[quote name='dave9t5' timestamp='1313024108' post='10601']
If you're going to be pedantic, it's actually boke; a standard Romanization of the Japanese word. Bokeh is just an alternative and somewhat Americanized Romanization of it.
The French bouquet seems a perfectly reasonable alternative Romanization and seems to be a very close match to the pronounciation to the the Japanese boke.
Compare pronounciations (click "Listen"):
[url="http://translate.google.com/?hl=&ie=UTF-8&text=&sl=zh-CN&tl=en#ja|en|%E6%9A%88%E3%81%91"]boke - Japanese[/url]
[url="http://translate.google.com/?hl=&ie=UTF-8&text=&sl=zh-CN&tl=en#fr|en|bouquet"]bouquet - français[/url]
Quite similar.
As for the meaning of boke, it simply means "blurred" or "out-of-focus". On it's own, it has no meaning about the quality (nor the amount of blur).
[/quote]
First of all, we are not just using a term from Japanese just because the use of it comes from Japan... We use it because in 1997 it was introduced by 3 Americans in the the "Photo techniques" publication.
They decided to add an H to the end to get people to pronounce it correctly, "bo" as in bone and "ke" as in Kenneth.
As the guy who introduced the word explains:
"I'd been troubled by the widespread punning on the CompuServe Photography Forum, where posters kept assuming that it rhymed with "toke" or "bloke." I figured the H at the end would help our readers pronounce it more accurately."
So, it is "bokeh" and not "boke". Not a Japanese word anymore, but a term in photography now which borrows its origins from Japanese.
Now about the use of the word. As I stated (correctly), bokeh is used to describe the QUALITY of the blur, not the QUANTITY.
The originator of the word (Mike Johnson) points to this link for the best description of "bokeh":
http://toothwalker.org/optics/bokeh.html
"The rendering of out-of-focus (OOF) image parts", "Owing to the subjective implications of some unquantifiable aesthetic value, it would be more appropriate to speak of pleasant or unpleasant bokeh, respectively."
Or as Mike Johnson wrote himself:
"Bokeh, regardless of what you may have
read on the web, merely refers to the subjective visual quality of the
way lenses render out-of-depth-of-field objects in pictures."
As I said, it is about the quality of the OOF parts, not the quantity.
Two articles from the man responsible that we use the term "bokeh" now, this one describing its 1997 origin:
http://theonlinephotographer.blogspot.co...it-is.html
And this one where he rates the bokeh of a number of lenses:
http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com...kings5.pdf
If you're going to be pedantic, it's actually boke; a standard Romanization of the Japanese word. Bokeh is just an alternative and somewhat Americanized Romanization of it.
The French bouquet seems a perfectly reasonable alternative Romanization and seems to be a very close match to the pronounciation to the the Japanese boke.
Compare pronounciations (click "Listen"):
[url="http://translate.google.com/?hl=&ie=UTF-8&text=&sl=zh-CN&tl=en#ja|en|%E6%9A%88%E3%81%91"]boke - Japanese[/url]
[url="http://translate.google.com/?hl=&ie=UTF-8&text=&sl=zh-CN&tl=en#fr|en|bouquet"]bouquet - français[/url]
Quite similar.
As for the meaning of boke, it simply means "blurred" or "out-of-focus". On it's own, it has no meaning about the quality (nor the amount of blur).
[/quote]
First of all, we are not just using a term from Japanese just because the use of it comes from Japan... We use it because in 1997 it was introduced by 3 Americans in the the "Photo techniques" publication.
They decided to add an H to the end to get people to pronounce it correctly, "bo" as in bone and "ke" as in Kenneth.
As the guy who introduced the word explains:
"I'd been troubled by the widespread punning on the CompuServe Photography Forum, where posters kept assuming that it rhymed with "toke" or "bloke." I figured the H at the end would help our readers pronounce it more accurately."
So, it is "bokeh" and not "boke". Not a Japanese word anymore, but a term in photography now which borrows its origins from Japanese.
Now about the use of the word. As I stated (correctly), bokeh is used to describe the QUALITY of the blur, not the QUANTITY.
The originator of the word (Mike Johnson) points to this link for the best description of "bokeh":
http://toothwalker.org/optics/bokeh.html
"The rendering of out-of-focus (OOF) image parts", "Owing to the subjective implications of some unquantifiable aesthetic value, it would be more appropriate to speak of pleasant or unpleasant bokeh, respectively."
Or as Mike Johnson wrote himself:
"Bokeh, regardless of what you may have
read on the web, merely refers to the subjective visual quality of the
way lenses render out-of-depth-of-field objects in pictures."
As I said, it is about the quality of the OOF parts, not the quantity.
Two articles from the man responsible that we use the term "bokeh" now, this one describing its 1997 origin:
http://theonlinephotographer.blogspot.co...it-is.html
And this one where he rates the bokeh of a number of lenses:
http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com...kings5.pdf