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Artistic Questions

Soft focus

Discuss style and artistic aspects of photography
cvcc
 
Posts: 22

Soft focus

Post Fri Mar 27, 2009 10:00 pm


I am new to the club though hardly to the camera. I see a great many of you assuming that "soft focus" is "out of focus". A lot of what I do, I do not want in sharp focus because it ruins the mood of the shot.

Joe Oliver

dang
 
Posts: 3780

Re: Soft focus

Post Sat Mar 28, 2009 11:10 am


cvcc wrote:I am new to the club though hardly to the camera. I see a great many of you assuming that "soft focus" is "out of focus". A lot of what I do, I do not want in sharp focus because it ruins the mood of the shot.

Joe Oliver


Hi Joe,
I'm not exactly sure what you're implying...
Would you care to elaborate, and post example photos (or at least links to your shots) with explanations of how you obtain "soft focus" photos?
Thanks!

creativeimagery
 
Posts: 31

Re: Soft focus

Post Mon Mar 30, 2009 8:36 pm


Joe,

I'm going to guess about what you mean by "soft focus". It really does NOT mean "out of focus". If you are talking about soft focus portraits, for example, you should consider 4 approaches:

1: Use the widest aperture your lens offers and focus sharply on your subject. The wide aperture will give you a narrow depth of focus, allowing the background to remain blurred while the subject is sharp. Also, some lens simply don't perform as well at wide apertures, and this may contribute to a soft look.

2: For portraits, a longer focal length is usually preferable. For 35mm, lens focal lengths of 75-150 are often used. These longer lens have a smaller depth of focus, so combined with a wide aperture, they make it easier to blur the background.

3: Use soft focus filters. These are available from Tiffen, Cokin, Hoya, and probably most other filter makers. These filters come in various strengths, and actually blur the image slightly, usually the highlights are most affected.

4: Use digital image processing, such as provided by Photoshop. This is currently my preferred method, since it gives me complete control of how much softening and where it's applied. Also, as long as you don't work on your original image, you can always undo what you've done. This technique works with any subject!

I hope this helps.

Cheers,

Terry Melman
Creative Imagery

dang
 
Posts: 3780

Re: Soft focus

Post Tue Mar 31, 2009 5:45 am


cvcc wrote:I am new to the club though hardly to the camera. I see a great many of you assuming that "soft focus" is "out of focus". A lot of what I do, I do not want in sharp focus because it ruins the mood of the shot.

Joe Oliver


Thank you Terry, although I'm aware of various techniques, including "toy cameras" and soft focus lenses...

But Joe sounds somewhat frustrated with his statement. Since he's posted under a group url, it would be nice to have a link to his examples. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, so I felt a possible opportunity to learn from his perspective, and hear more of his thoughts. :)

soenda
 
Posts: 1390

Re: Soft focus

Post Tue Mar 31, 2009 10:51 pm


I didn't get the impression that Joe wanted instructions about how to achieve soft focus so much as other people's reactions to sharp focus as the only way to go.

I certainly see plenty of that---sharp focus as an end in itself---at forums like DPReview. There are several possible explanations for why soft focus has fallen out of favor with the forum crowd. One is simply that fashions influence which end of various continuums are more popular at any given moment. I've seen the same sort of thing with color saturation, for example. Some groups tend to criticize any hint of oversaturation, while others delight in it.

Another reason may be the number of people who are in photography for the love of the gear. Sharpness is a dimension affected by increasingly expensive lenses, so it becomes synonymous in some circles with image quality. I think some "gear heads," if I may be permitted to call them that affectionately, wouldn't know what to do with a soft focus portrait, or forest-scape. I think they'd be inclined to call it a mistake. :wink:

Post script: I attended a local camera club for the first time recently. Half their meetings are spent in competitions with judges from other clubs. I was surprised to find how much emphasis was being put on the need to have clouds in the sky of any landscape. For myself, it really depends on the composition---as well as the opportunity---to say whether "clouds are missing." The importance of clouds to this group struck me as a local thing that had been incorporated into their "minimum standards" for landscapes. Personally, I'm not big on art in competition, but it's interesting to hear what qualities people value in photography from place to place.

doady
 
Posts: 92

Re: Soft focus

Post Thu Apr 02, 2009 8:00 am


Doesn't anyone have example to soft focus? I would like to see exactly what it means.

I personally do like to have blur in some shots. I think a lot of my photos are considered unacceptable by almost everyone partly because of the blur (and for other reasons as well). But then again, they are not actually photos, they are just snapshots.

soenda wrote:Post script: I attended a local camera club for the first time recently. Half their meetings are spent in competitions with judges from other clubs. I was surprised to find how much emphasis was being put on the need to have clouds in the sky of any landscape. For myself, it really depends on the composition---as well as the opportunity---to say whether "clouds are missing." The importance of clouds to this group struck me as a local thing that had been incorporated into their "minimum standards" for landscapes. Personally, I'm not big on art in competition, but it's interesting to hear what qualities people value in photography from place to place.


Well clouds do add a lot of depth to wide-angle landscape shots. Off course, one could simply raise the horizon to compensate for the lack of clouds. I have seen some really great cloudless landscape photos out there from other people.

sean_mcr
 
Posts: 493

Re: Soft focus

Post Thu Apr 02, 2009 2:38 pm


One of the mistakes that early pictorialists made was try to disguise the unique ability that photography possesses, the cameras unique relationship to the physical world. So much of the world was softened or made unrecognisable with painterly effects. Painting was the higher art and photography was seen as too mechanical and to exacting to be artistic so many tried to ape painting. This is now part of photography's rich history and photography has now become a legitimate art form in its own right. In order to do that the cameras relationship to the physical world had to be embraced and so pictorialism was abandoned for realism.

The idea of soft focus being somehow more artistic was finally deemed to be naive and misguided early in the last century. So your idea looks back to a time when photography did not have its own voice and had it remained that way photography's impact on the world would have been softened. But in many ways people who judge a photograph by its sharpness are equally misguided. The qualities (not properties) in a photograph lie in its content and form and each serves the other and can be independent of softness or sharpness.

As for mood

The correct use of light and some insight will give you all the mood you're ever going to need
What uses having a great depth of field, if there is not an adequate depth of feeling? -

W. Eugene Smith


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