Confessions of a Bokeh Junkie: I've Made a Terrible Mistake

Faster, higher, stronger is the code by which I have made most of my lens and camera decisions for nearly a decade. I've never been satisfied with f/2.8. I've waged war between the focal planes of the eye and the eyelash, and I have the scars and image casualties to prove it. As I grow older and my battle-weary eyes begin to look back at my quest, I have begun to see the emptiness in it all. Were even my perfect shots completely out of focus?

It all started with f/1.8.

On the urging of a hobbyist friend, the "nifty fifty" nursed me from my fledgling state and set the foundation for what would become my photographic passion. When I began, I had no other friends in the world of serious photography, aside from my coworker at the time. While really not long ago, the internet of 2007 was a vastly different landscape for beginners than it is today. It was harsh and unforgiving. It was a time Flickr reigned supreme, the iPhone with it's 2.0 megapixel camera didn't have an app store, and Facebook displayed images at a mammoth 604px on the long edge. Asking for advice was ego suicide as old-timers were hostile to those that didn't understand basic technical concepts. While I suppose not much as changed there, overall there weren't nearly as many great easy-to-consume beginner resources as there are today. This was the golden age of point-and-shoots. Digital SLRs were finally exiting puberty, but were priced far outside the scope of most hobbyists. With my drool-worthy 10 megapixel crop-sensor Nikon D80 and 50mm f/1.8, I was the talk of my friends. "Look at how blurry that background gets!" I remember them saying. A shallow depth of field had become the hallmark of a professional photographer because, in the digital age, only they could afford the cameras that could achieve such a surreal world.

I loved the look. I loved the attention. I ran with it.

As is my millennial nature, I could only be satisfied for so long until I could discover the next best thing. Fortunately the upgrade path was being carved out for me as Nikon released their D3 and D700 full-frame bodies the very next year. As a concert photographer from the very beginning of my journey, the low-light capability of large aperture "fast glass" had always appealed to me in addition to the background blending feature. My primary motivation for upgrading to a larger sensor was for the low light capability, but when I discovered that a larger capture medium equates to shallower depth of field, I was fueled once again in my bokeh quest.

And with that, I spiraled out of control.

A larger sensor was able to lasso in more bokeh, so what else can I do?

Longer lenses! So then I picked up a 70-200mm, and to this day it's essentially been fused at its racked-out 200mm position, but the 85mm f/1.4 was also getting the job done for me.

What else can I do?

I can shoot film! For the price of a moderately nice lens I can buy a medium format film camera that has a "sensor" almost six times larger than my full-frame D700!

What else can I do?

I can stitch images together in a panorama that goes both left/right and up/down to technically enlarge my digital camera's sensor!

What else can I do?

I can buy exotic lenses with abnormally large apertures or ones that have extreme field curvature that push the background even more out of focus!

What else can I do?

I can combine that panorama method together with those exotic lenses!

What else can I do?

I can take the fastest f/1.2 lens I own and tilt it away from the camera body to bend the plane of focus leaving almost nothing in the photo in focus!

What else can I do?

I can buy an even bigger film camera with even bigger negatives!

And then it hit me. Why? I mean, I get it. After you scrape away all the obsessiveness and technicalities, it's still a neat look. After all, human beings don't see the world with such compressed two-dimensionalism, and photography has always been about telling the unseen story. In a sense, shallow depth of field is a mechanism for story telling in its own right. It forces the viewer to pay attention to exactly what you think they should be paying attention to. But the trope, like many other amazing tools, becomes worn out.

More importantly, the quest for bokeh has blinded me to what photography is truly about; it's about using the entire frame to tell a story. I have thirty-six megapixels in my hand right now. Why can't I use every last one towards a focused purpose? What really drove home the disconnect between "effect" and "affect" was this gallery of powerful photos from the past 150 years. It dawned on me that almost all of the greatest and most famous photos of all time had deep or moderately deep depth of field. Not only that, but the photos that had shallow depth of field were mostly out of necessity from either low light conditions or being taken on large format film. Blurry backgrounds do not make the photo. The stories do.

So I removed the Leica Noctliux 50mm f/0.95 from my shopping cart.

Chasing bokeh isn't just distracting, but it's expensive. Those exotic lenses are the definition of expensive, and sometimes you end up buying entire new camera systems just to achieve the next high. It's especially sobering when you realize people like my buddy Andrew Griswold are making their living shooting with their iPhone. Between the lenses you don't really need that aren't improving your photography, and the cameras that just sit on a shelf and collect dust, is a heap of money you could use to travel to any location on planet earth and take photos there. I'm talking to you, photographer that doesn't live in the Pacific Northwest or Iceland.

Shallow depth of field certainly has its place, especially in portraiture, so it's not like I'm going to start shooting everything at f/8, but the realization is that I need to be satisfied with where I am and what I've got. I really don't need to keep chasing the fix, and I can be happy with my work now. It's really time for me to get some help, and the first step is admitting I have a problem.

I'm Sean and I'm a bokeholic. It's been one day since my last Brenizer panorama.