"A friend of mine detests blurry images. Some of my favorites he dismisses as “not sharp.” We all have strong and different reactions to image rendition, and that’s good!"
Yes indeed. Blur can be good as a contrast to sharpness.
And not only that, but as Mike Johnston sometimes says about various things: "it's only a property". As opposed to a measure of quality, I guess he means. He also pointed out to me how sharpness is very subjective. A picture of something in strong light can look a lot sharper than something in dull light, even if it aint.
If you shoot for Architectural Digest, you don't want blur, and you don't want converging verticals. But in amateur pictures and art pictures, anything goes. It's just what you like.
Sharpness, even in the focal plane, while usually a good thing, is not strictly necessary. Once on a holiday, I shot with disposable cameras, pardon me, recyclable cameras. I came home with a couple of pictures I really liked, despite the fact that even at 8x10 they could not be called sharp by any measure. And it may even have helped them, since their main quality was soft tones, and these may have been helped into prominence by the absence of sharp detail.
One should try not to get too hung up on any one property. Once back in my old photo club days, I was reviewing somebody else's photo of a girl on a bicycle. I really liked it. Two of the members heckled me because it was not sharp. Sure, it was not the sharpest picture I'd seen, but for me it did not ruin it, it was just a lovely picture.
Background blur, of course, can be just pleasant. Here are some pictures I took with the Canon 5D and the excellent Canon lens 35mm F:1.4. It has some vignetting if used at full aperture, but I kind of like that.
Update: by a funny coinkidink, Mike just wrote something relevant in the first of his new columns:
"...once I've decided a lens is okay, I just photograph with it. If some slight technical flaw shows up in a picture, I don't obsess about it.
And when you think about it, isn't that really the mark of maturity in a photographer? He or she does the necessary research, acquires the equipment needed to do the work, but then gets on with the work. And forgets about the equipment."
5 comments:
Blurry sharp things are cool; they emphasize the sharpness of the subject. Blur and sharpness go hand-in-hand, a ying/yang with many images. Neither is better, but a lens that is bitingly sharp and offers pleasing blur provides great possibilities. Some subjects cry out for detail; others are totally about feel, and making a sharp image would ruin the feel. On the other hand, the one eye sharp and the other blurred rarely works for me.
I used the Leica 90/2 APO-Summicron-R ASPH to make some blurry images here: http://diglloyd.com/diglloyd/2008-07-blog.html#_20080708Blur .
And I've shot through grimy train windows too: http://diglloyd.com/diglloyd/2007-08-blog.html#20070801ViewFromATrain
Lenses that offer a tilt function provide even more flexibility; playing with our perceptions, like the brick wall here:
http://diglloyd.com/diglloyd/2008-07-blog.html#_20080710Nikon24TS
Photography would be very boring without blur!
"On the other hand, the one eye sharp and the other blurred rarely works for me."
Huh??
In my early high school days I went on the Art Department trip to France, we stayed for a week outside Carcaconne in a chateau. Fantastic.
On the bus one of the girls playfully was lashing out with her cardigan. One of the buttons hit me in the lens. That was it, I was blurry in one eye for the rest of the week.
I faithfully carried my spare glasses with me for years, but had missed packing them on this trip - hey, we were all grown up 12-18 year olds on this trip, we'd left that rough stuff behind.
The one eye sharp and the other blurred did not work for me.
Yes, a good thing glasses are so cheap now they give away a second pair.
And that they are all now nigh-unbreakable plastic. I once dropped a glass on cobbled stones, it was not hurt!
Classic example of when to blur and not to blur, in Dr Horrible, Act I, during the laundromat ballad when Billy freezes Penny, she is sharp and crisp, but the laundry is blurred.
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