funny thing about focus

[Kalkadan]

As some of you know I've posted shots recently which were taken with film in manual focus cameras.  A number of you commented on the apparent sharpness.  I too thought they were sharp.

However when I showed them to my wife she watched in silence, called for her reading glasses and watched them again.  Then she said that a significant number of them seemed more "blurry" than shots taken with my digital cameras.  I was shocked.  She's a smart chick.  Why does she think shots are not in focus or blurred when experienced photographers think otherwise?  I was also reminded that she made the same comment when I showed her some photos by Cartier-Bresson in a thick book we looked at in Borders a few weeks ago.

I wonder if this reaction is becoming more common among members of the public who are not seasoned photographers; that is, those who only have experience of the massive depth of field of modern, small sensor digital cameras.  Could it be that they have become conditioned to seeing all photos as sharp everywhere, not just at the main point of interest?

After I explained that some of us just love to use wide apertures to throw everything into a dreamy (hopefully) out of focus blur apart from, say, the eyes of a subject, she got the idea.  She agreed that the bits I referred to were indeed in focus.  But I could tell that she was not convinced that, as an object of the photographic exercise, it was a Good Idea.

If this perception takes hold we are all doomed to lives of wasted artistic endeavour at f1.4! 

Anyone else had this happen to them?

Dan

[jake]

All the time. My wife has a certain perspective on what is a good image, and that may or may not be what I think a good image is from a technical/aesthetic standpoint. For example, slide film allows for using shadows as dark geometric shapes, ala David Alan Harvey's work or Alex Webb's work. My wife has on occasion looked at images that I have spent a lot of time working on to get just so, and her immediate reaction is that they are too dark. Sometimes she is right - she isn't unfamiliar with principles of design or aesthetics - but sometimes she is reacting merely to the amount of dark and not to the overall image. And that's because (I have learned) that she sees certain things as expressions of emotion or psychological state of the subject or the photographer when I have not. Or even if I have, I don't see those things as negatives (no pun intended) but positives in achieving what I set out to do. Another similar comment is that the people look too sad or that the photograph is depressing. Or she expresses the caution that I should not show the photograph to the subject because it will make them sad. To me, life is equal parts sadness and happiness, so a photograph that achieves that level of poignancy is great! But I think that this all comes down to what one person thinks is the mission of photography or the role of a photograph varies. My wife feels (quite strongly sometimes!) that a photograph should commemorate the best moments of people's lives, while I think that photographs should commemorate moments period, be they best worst light dark happy or sad. So when I make a photo that bumps up against this difference, my wife may characterize the photo as having too much black in it or being too dark or say that I shouldn't show it to the subject because it will make them sad. And like I said, she is right sometimes and wrong sometimes and sometimes she is both right and wrong. The latter category usually means that the photo is a good one.

Not sure if that makes any sense, but there you go.

[LarryD]

I need new glasses I know it... My AF pictures are much sharper than my Manual Focus pictures.... Maybe her eyes are getting older and not yours LOL

[Greg M]

     Nice thought !!
     Our interpetations of photos are all pre-conditioned by expectations.  My children believe all photos should be in color (and sharp), my wife thinks my best photos are spontaneous ones of the family, and my sister, who is a digital photographer, loves sharp, well-focused color (especially landscapes) with a slight wide angle effect.  God help you if there is a little blur from using natural light instead of flash.
     I still plug along with  various lenses,films, black and white shapes, textures, and portraits with "fuzzy" areas.  My own pre-conceptions colored by a love affair with the f-64 group, Walker Evans, and various National Geographic photographers.  This is very anachronistic, but was once in the main stream of what people "expected" of photography.
   Add to this the bombardment of ads in magazines and television with their distortions of photos (and words), it seems a consensus on what is photography (let alone sharpness) is well-nigh impossible.

[sandeha]

I suspect that what a lot of modern eyes are reacting to is sharp contrast rather than sharpness (resolution).  Modern lenses are hyper contrasty and while they may also be sharp, and produce sharp photos, many older lenses are no less sharp but they are a lot less contrasty.

Thass ma theory.  But modern eyes also seem to like very high contrasts, especially in b&w, which personally do very little for me.  Things change - I was looking at a nature-type photo book last week (in a nice cafe called Bauhaus) and guessed that it must have been printed in the mid eighties, or thereabouts.  Apart from being all shot on slide film I'd say every image was shot with a polariser and warm up filter.  Dated, just as many of today's high gloss, high contrast b&w shots will soon seem dated.

[Julio1fer]

I've noticed exactly the same reaction. There are reasons for it - DOF making everything sharp, and digicams choosing very fast shutter speeds whenever they can. Those two factors really make the average image of the average amateur (not that Dan is average, of course)  sharper on digital than on film, especially if you like slow film and use no tripod.

However, in my limited experience, this comment only applies to shots viewed on a computer screen, though. I've never seen people commenting on this issue when they look at slides (with loupe) or good B&W prints - rather it becomes the opposite, as in "Boy, they don't make lenses like this anymore" or  "How incredible sharp".

[P C Headland]

You see a similar thing with architectural photographs - people think nothing of a building seemingly falling over.  If you use perspective control on a LF camera, or digitally, to correct the perspective, many people will say it looks odd.

Micro contrast and relatively strong contrast curves, with boosted saturation seem to be the current fashion. I'm sure in the near future, we'll look back on all this with disdain, just like we did last time round.

[Alan Gage]

Things change - I was looking at a nature-type photo book last week (in a nice cafe called Bauhaus) and guessed that it must have been printed in the mid eighties, or thereabouts.  Apart from being all shot on slide film I'd say every image was shot with a polariser and warm up filter.

It's always surprising how obvious things are ten years after.

I recently read an interesting book (printed in 1996) about nature in Iowa. It wasn't necessarily photo centric but the author was a very good photographer and sprinkled plenty of his own shots throughout the book. Also interesting in that he talked about his photography in the book and gave camera/exposure details for each photo in an index at the back.

Anyway, what struck me as I went through the book was that pretty much all the images were shot in the 70's, 80's and early 90's, but I couldn't tell which was from which decade, nor could I tell they weren't shot yesterday. Their was a timelessness to them. Kind of like guys in black tuxedos, no matter what the current fashion trend a black tux always looks good.

Boy, you know I'm really reaching when I break out the fashion analogies. 

Alan

BTW, they were all shot on slide film (Kodachrome if I remember) in both 35mm and 4x5.

[jake]

Alan, Kodachrome really helps with the sense of timelessness. I have a theory that most Americans' sense of what red and yellow look like is from Kodachrome, because the magazines that disseminated what America looked like (& the world looked like to American photographers) used Kodachrome - Life, Look, National Geographic, Time, Newsweek - at least for their features (I would assume a lot of Ektrachrome got used too.) Timelessness suggests a sort of null value, that this is what things look like when things are unadulterated by the tint of any specific time period. Normal. And I think for a lot of Americans, a Kodachrome image looks normal.

There are some recent books that make a similar point with their assortment of images: Americans in Kodachrome; America the Beautiful; and Kodachrome: The American Invention of Our World.

Obviously, with the advent of digital images, what seems normal to you or me may not seem so to someone younger (and therefore less wise .) Digital may look perfectly normal. That may explain why when someone looks at a scanned film image now, they may actually see it as new rather old - the novelty, not nostalgia, of the past as it were.