17 October 2007 Hydrangeas and Senility
Japanese people love hydrangeas. They’re all over the place. A veritable blight on the landscape.
OK, not quite. I like them too, although I don’t think they need to be quite so ubiquitous as they are here. The entire hillside leading up to Genbo’s daycare is planted in hydrangeas, and I took these photos last June when they were blooming.
Notice how the out-of-focus areas have a pleasant rendering. This is referred to as bokeh. The term is originally Japanese, but it’s easier to say than “out of focus rendering,” so it’s been adopted in English as well. In Japanese, however, it also means “senility” of various kinds—in fact, the term has been frequently applied to yours truly for reasons that will be immediately obvious to anyone who knows me well.
The 70-200 VR lens I shot these with is known to have nice bokeh. Some lenses have a nice and smooth (“creamy” as camera geeks like to say) bokeh, while that produced by other lenses will be more jagged. There are people who spend inordinate amount of time comparing and arguing over various qualities of bokeh on the Internet. Or so I hear.
I like to think that both my lenses and I have a nice bokeh about us.
1 comment in “Hydrangeas and Senility”
October 17th, 2007 at 9:10 pm
Absolutely exquisite composition and bokeh. Much better than anything I can do.
I posted a bit about bokeh once, but my example picture is pathetic compared to yours. The green in the top one has something about it that I just really does it for me.