Bokeh or not?

[Yi-P]

Just playing around in the gardens and got these:










Is the bokeh a bit strange around or its nice? I have my feeling mixed, not sure how I should describe this...

[wendellt]

the quality of the out of focus areas is a bit strange i dont consider it to be quality creamy bokeh associated with f1.4

although it has a painterly effect so thats cool, but if your asking if this is good bokeh i'd say not really unless your intentionally going for that surreal painterly look

i like the last one, looks more special from the isolation and blotchy effect

[Pa]

the orange back ground in 2 is a little over powering, it tends to take my eye to it, away from the in focus blue flower.


cheers pa

[gstark]

Part of the definition of bokeh is that it refers to out of focus highlights. Many seem to confuse that with a softly rendered, OOF background or foreground.

There's a difference.

Now that I've gotten that off my chest, none of these images do anything for me. It seems to me as if you've made these images in order to render a soft, OOF background and/or foreground, rather than to make an image of the purple flowers themselves.

I'm not sure that that technique can work too often, and for me, as displayed here, it doesn't. There's just way too much that's OOF, and that distracts from what's in focus.

Maybe some judicious cropping will help the first two, but I think that, to misquote the words of a former PM, nothing can save the third of them.