Very few things get me riled up like buzzwords, soundbites, and marketing drivel. And over the years, I've noticed some words in the photography vernacular that are right up there on the gibberish scale. Here are a few examples.
While procrastinating this week, I came across a job advertisement on a site I like to occasionally peruse, and the language left me dazed, confused, and in a state of giggles. "Is this really how people speak these days," I thought to myself. To get an idea what I'm talking about, here are some choice phrases used in the ad: "evangelize the product vision," "own the roadmap," "lead technical debt," and my favorite, "fail well." So, this got me thinking about photography and some of the words and terms that are far too frequently used and make me want to smash my camera to smithereens over an evangelized product's proverbial head.
"Creamery" and "Buttery"
Seriously, what the actual funk? Creamy? Buttery? Who started this ridiculous term? But more importantly, who ran with it and allowed it to become part of the everyday photography vernacular? Heads should roll. If you're not familiar with either of these interchangeable terms, they refer to the blur effect that lenses with very wide apertures allow you to produce. When you shoot wide open (at say f/1.8), then your subject will be in focus and the background will be blurry. Different lenses create slightly different shapes that are sometimes more or less roundish, but are pretty much the same to the naked eye. Somehow, somewhere along the line, some bright spark decided to describe the blurry effect as "creamy" or "buttery." To this day, I have absolutely no idea what it means. Here's an example shot below, where you can see the blurs and circular shapes in the background. Creamy? Buttery? Errr, no.
Bokeh
This particular one is like a thousand fingernails scratching vertical lines up and down a blackboard to me. No, it's worse actually. More like a person with a mouth full of silver fillings in their teeth grinding aluminum foil back and forth incessantly. I think it's mainly for two reasons: first, the wild variations of pronunciation and second, the actual choice of the word. In terms of pronunciation, I hear all types of versions like "bow-ka," "bow-kay," "bohhh-kaaa," "boh-kee," "boh-ka," and so on and so forth. Bokeh is actually a Japanese word that is pronounced with a very short "bo" and a very short "ke", as in Ken.
Perhaps because I live in Japan, it annoys me to no end when I hear the mangled versions so-called influencers and YouTubers come out with. However, it's understandable because it's a Japanese word. But that brings me to my next point. Why did some person way back when decide that the best way to describe the blur effect of a given lens would be to pluck the Japanese term from the tree and plonk it into photography English? It's not like English doesn't have its own words that can do the same job. And even when you use "bokeh" with 95% of the English speaking world, you then have to explain that it means blurriness and out-of-focus areas anyway. So, why not just use those words in the first place instead of a random word from another language? And now, the effect is we get all these people trying to sound knowledgeable by using a Japanese word and then mangling its pronunciation. Awesome.
Fine Art
I don't know about you, but if I see another person describing themselves as a fine art photographer or a creator of fine art, I think I'll drown myself in a bucket of creamy, buttery bokeh. This all came to a head for me last week when I bumped into an acquaintance of mine who I'd worked with previously in education. I asked what she'd been up to and she said she'd just started up an Instagram page trying to sell fine art prints. It took me aback a bit because she'd never been the slightest bit interested in photography and after talking with her for about 10 minutes, it became abundantly clear she didn't have the first clue about anything related to photography. Indeed, it transpired that she'd recently bought the iPhone X, invested in some reasonable clip-on lenses, and thought her new hobby made her a fine artist that she could make a buck from, so much so that her new Instagram profile bio reads: "fine art photographer. Creator of fine art photos." Outstanding.
But it's not just her. Type in "fine art" to the Instagram search field and you get an endless list of people describing themselves as fine art photographers. Then, check out their galleries and you'll see that 90% of their images are nothing more than regular snaps thousands of other photographers are taking. Take a photo of a wedding. Fine art. Shoot a flower. Fine art. Black and white. Fine art. Your kids at the beach. Fine art. Just add fine art to your name and you have instant credibility. Just look at these images I snapped off below. Fine art galore.
Now, don't get me wrong. There are some wonderful photographers out there today creating extraordinary pieces of fine art. It's those cheapening the term by using it so loosely and freely that annoy me to no end because they are detracting from the true creators of fine art we have among us.
Summing Up
In the modern day world, it seems the academic boffins out there are in an endless pursuit to create more and more pointless, meaningless, confusing terms to enter into mainstream vernacular in order to fatten their credentials and pad their images. Terms like "moving forward," "thought leaders," "brand awareness," and "ice the game" have all somehow entered our worlds and are spouted ad nauseam by so-called experts. It's no different in the world of photography, and today, I've given you a few different examples that get me quite riled up when I hear them. I didn't list too many, because I'd love to hear words and terms that you really hate hearing too.
So, don't hold back. Let me know your thoughts and annoyances in the comments below.
The first photography award I won had a single entrant. Me.
And you still came in 2nd. :-)
Reminds me of car adds; 'Best in its class'...what class? How many in this class?
I get irritated by "best we have ever made". Of course, one expects the new model to be better than the one that was replaced. Why would a car company advertise that the new model was not quite as good as the old?
Tog yes!! And piece of glass....why use one word when you can use 3....
The cover image? A fine art iphone photo taken without any special piece of glass....
Epic.
A "Tog" is the same as a "Wank."
Haha that award winning thing winds me up, it’s such a loose term. I won a set of travel books for posting a shot on a Facebook group, hardly an ‘award’ but I can guarantee plenty of people would use it.
Piece of Glass really grinds my gears too
For me, it is "mood board", I get that it is helpful to the creative team but I find it so annoying that part of coming up with a concept is going and randomly hunting (often for hours) around the internet hoping that someone else has already done it.
Haha “mood board”? WTF is that?
A collage of photos that “show” what you are trying to create. The expectation is that you hunt through the internet to try to find examples of your vision.
looking at other people’s work to get an example of your vision. That....confuses me and has me in a very confounded mood now haha
Exactly! I hate the idea of having to "proof" my idea by showing the ideas of others.
Just photos?
I get colour swatches, inspirational quotes and just about anything they can stick on a 8 page PDF. Proper works of art, some of them.
Too funny, “A collage of photos that “show” what you are trying to create. The expectation is that you hunt through the internet to try to find examples of your vision.” that should read someone else's vision. New one to me, sad and kinda lame.
I actually get those a lot from clients, or is it agencies, or studios? or even customers. I can't remember what I'm supposed to call them.
Despite the daft name, they're actually pretty handy! I can't make them for toffee, but creative people seem to love them to express their desires. :)
I think mood boards are great, and often times a huge time saver. When trying to put a project together it's a lot easier to get an idea across with a mood board than verbally.
Only if the concept is generic enough that finding mood board imagery is easy. Though I find it also tends to create unnecessary barriers such as when the team gets hung up on trying to "copy" exactly what they see in the mood board.
I don't think they are useful to only generic concepts. I think it depends greatly on how they're used. Often times I'll use my own images, or stills from movies as part of the mood board. I always convey that it's a "mood board" not a template.
It could be just me, but I've found it much more efficient to firmly establish a concept and then build a mood board that I can use in conjunction with verbally explaining it. I suppose it matters who you're dealing with, but I've found that stylists, MUAs, and models seem to really appreciate it.
Oh, I definitely agree in that they appreciate it. Most demand it. But for highly specific concepts I often find myself hunting for images for hours and hours and at the end, I haven't found a single image that "really" portrays what I'm after so I end with a mood board that has a ton of caveats and notes. "Look at this but not this", "This is about this, and not this", etc. Then the team never reads the notes and is hopelessly confused.
I am so with you regarding 'bokeh', especially when pronounced by Americans and Canadians. It seems North American cannot pronounce a simple 'BO' it always sounds like 'BOW'. My name is Motti and I cannot tell you how many variations of my name I heard in the past 30 years living in Canada (Mowti. Mownti etc... :-)).
The word 'Bokeh' is pronounced exactly as you described it; 'BOKE'. And not 'BOWKE' or worse, 'BOWKA'.
Cheers.
The funny thing is, I teach photography to college students here and sometimes we look at videos where English speakers say “bokeh”. I don’t think one of my students has ever realised what they were talking about!
Things like this happen in many languages. For example, in English we still spell it "tsunami" but we pronounce it "sumani", changing the つ sound for a す sound. On top of that, I apparently live near "To-KEY-oh" according to most English speakers. Whereas in Japanese, they turn everything in to katakana, so even when I teach words like "etiquette" they don't understand it's the same as "エチケット" until I say it that way.
Don't even get me started on the blatant misuse of words like "high tension" here, haha.
Haha the Japanese language has mangled so many words I’ve lost count, and my exasperation has turned into a shrug of the shoulders. The worst thing, as you said, is having to mangle a word from my own language just so the Japanese can understand what I’m saying. I feel dirty when I say things haha
There's also a problem with the pronounciation of nikon...
You used a lower case n.
You're so bad
does it matter ? :D
and I only use nikon gear ;) (oups... I did it again :D )
Also wrote "pronounciation" which is a common mispronunciation of "pronunciation"! 😀
Don’t start me there
'Light quality' when describing strobe or Speedlight.
"Speedlight instead of "flash" is also a bit obnoxious. :-)
Flash is pretty vague, while speedlight is specific, I don't see how that is obnoxious? "Bring two speedlights" vs. "Bring two flashes", which one is more likely to cause a misunderstanding?
"Iconic."
How many icons we must have in this photographic world of ours.....just one letter away from ironic
"epic"...
The (insert a number) ways of doing this and that...
This was a buttery article. Very entertaining.
The only vision I get with “buttery” is Kramer getting roasted as a chicken.....
Thank god I wasn’t drinking coffee when I read this post, it’d be all over my MacBook right now!!!!! :)
And Newman wants to eat him! Lol
Fine art. ARGH. Drives me insane.
Great artists create. Great marketers classify. ;) It is much easier to call bad work "fine art" than to actually create great art.
Agreed. Let other people decide whether it is "fine" or not.
Being fluent in Japanese, I, too, find "bokeh" ridiculous. It simply means "blur" or "perceptual fuzziness". There's nothing esoteric or differently nuanced about it, and "blur" is a perfectly adequate synonym in the context of photography.
It's as if Americans have suddenly started calling their food "oishii" instead of "delicious", as if "oishii" somehow signifies a higher level of complexity in flavor or sophistication in the consumer. (It doesn't.)
We have a few of those ripsnorters in wider English. How about paying “homage” to someone? Or not being too “au fait” with something. The great thing is listening to my fellow Aussies busting out such French words. Dear lord haha
Ignore that pretentious dork. I know Japanese photographers who confirmed to me, that the term does mean- "Characteristics of the background blur." The aesthetic qualities of the blur, so to speak.
Then the appropriate term in English would be "quality of blur".
Blur has other meanings that bokeh doesn't. Such as motion blur. Bokeh is a good word. I remember the days before we adopted its usage, and we never even considered lens bokeh in reviews and purchases. We didn't really know how to discuss it. Oh gosh, that 500 mm catadioptric lens on my Nikon F. Great reach, but the horrible bokeh gave you a reason to want something one might describe as 'buttery" in the background.
And "bokeh" has meanings that "blur" doesn't. But, when you're talking about photography, "bokeh" = "quality of blur". Understand, too, that Japanese tends to be a very vague language. It doesn't have to be. It's possible to be extremely precise in Japanese. But, as a highly context-dependent language, precision is often foregone for the sake of convenience, and it is expected that the listener/reader will fill in the missing information based on the context and their own understanding of the matter under discussion. So, the "quality" part of the English phrase "quality of blur" is simply dropped, and you are expected to intuit that because the topic is photography rather than, say, bad eyesight or mental disfunction, what is being referenced is how blur looks in a photo. I can't tell you how many times, in my work as a translator, I turned to my Japanese colleague to ask "what or who is the subject of this verb" or "to what/whom does this clause apply" and he couldn't tell me. Translating typically vague Japanese into English can be maddening and requires both creativity and linguistic gymnastics.
Also, photography has been first a hobby and then a profession for me for almost 40 years, and I can report that quality of lens blur was certainly a topic of discussion among my colleagues and in relevant media long before "bokeh" crossed the Pacific.
I guess your not fluent enough to understand it actually means "the aesthetic qualities" of the background blur. Not the blur itself. There is no English equivalent word.