Selective focus in camera ...is it a thing of the past?

[Patrik Roseen]

When I got into LF I used tilt and swing to put the plane of focus so that when stopping down I would get everything sharp with details everywhere.

After a while I did not stop down so that I would get a selective focus on film. As many know this can be used to make things look as if they move when they are still, objects can appear to be miniatures etc.

I now realize that in the digital darkroom one can do many of these things with the tools available in PS. I have seen amazing pics of digital photographers done this way.

It would ofcourse be possible to achive a similar effect in the wet darkroom by tilting the baseboard and lens of the enlarger (although I have not done this).

If this is the case, why should I not just go for maximum DoF in camera and add the effects afterwards. This way I can use the same film for many different end results.

Any thoughts appreciated.

[Daniel_Buck]

doing the effect in photoshop does not give the same look as it does when you do it with a lens. when you do it with a lens, you get some swirling and other lens artefacts. Doing it in photoshop just looks to 'clean', if that makes sense, and you'll be blurring out your film grain too. If you do it in-camera, you keep your film grain. And in addition to the look of the effect, it really only works on smaller images in photoshop. Once your image gets large, you are limited by the amount of blur you can apply (250 pixels, or something like that) at least, in CS2 anyway. So you would only be able to do so much blurring on a file that is large enough to print from. I've never tried it on an enlarger, so I can't comment on that.

You could always shoot the scene twice, once with tilt/swing, and one with none :-)

The swirling at the top of the frame, I don't believe you would be able to get that using any digital processing, accept possibly in some high-end compositing programs with some custom scripting.

[David A. Goldfarb]

I've never seen a digital blur effect that doesn't look artificial.

[willwilson]

I have to agree with David. Digital blur looks like digital blur. I think there is definitely a need for some out of focus digital modeling tools that recreate the look of an actual lens.

[jb7]

People who spend a lot of effort post-processing blur into digital pictures
aren't necessarily au fait with optics,
and the results are inevitably less than convincing-

It's a lot easier and quicker to do it in camera,
if that's what you want to do-

joseph

[Bruce Watson]

...why should I not just go for maximum DoF in camera and add the effects afterwards. This way I can use the same film for many different end results.

Any thoughts appreciated.

Because that would betray a weakness of artistic vision. To my way of thinking (which I admit up front may be meaningless to anyone else) one should know what one is trying to accomplish before setting up on the scene. Everything you do, from picking where to set your tripod, picking your lens, setting your movements, selecting an aperture, etc. should be in support of the vision you had that drove you to make a photograph of this particular scene in the first place.

A similar question comes up from time to time -- why not shoot everything in color then convert to B&W if you want later? Same answer -- the choice of film to use should support your vision. If your vision isn't strong enough for you to decide whether to use color or B&W, why are you making the photograph in the first place?

You asked for thoughts... For better or worse, those are mine.

[Struan Gray]

I use it a lot - mostly as a way of making sense of complex structures.

Optical blur (including that of our eyes) changes with distance, so if you want to automate post-processing blur you need a stereo pair or some other way of providing distance information. A skilled retoucher could make a good job of varying the blur to match expectations, but most don't seem to bother.

Maria Miesenberger is one photographer/artist who turns this on it's head and uses the unsettling look of an even blur as part of how she communicates. The blur works best at the actual print size (as far as I can tell it is carefully chosen to make you think you should be able to focus your eyes at normal viewing distances) but you can see an example here:

http://www.sfoto.se/sff_start/nyhete...Page=36&ID=701

[Oren Grad]

Optical blur (including that of our eyes) changes with distance, so if you want to automate post-processing blur you need a stereo pair or some other way of providing distance information.

Blur character doesn't vary just with distance, it varies also with the optical design. That's part of what makes it so delicious, but also so difficult to simulate convincingly.

[Brian Ellis]

I've done it in Photoshop occasionally and it looks fine, indistinguishable to my eyes from doing it in camera. However, I belong to the school that says you should get everything as right as possible in the camera and keep Photoshop editing to a minimum so I usually do it the old fashioned way, in the camera. I do it in Photoshop only when I didn't think to do it in camera.

[Michael Chmilar]

Computational Photography is an active area of research, which covers a number of diverse topics, one of which is image refocus and depth of field control:

http://web.media.mit.edu/~raskar/Mask/

http://www.graficaobscura.com/depth/index.html

A major aspect of Computational Photography is to expand the range of data captured in the field, thus allowing decisions about exposure, focus, depth of field, plane of focus (or multiple planes of focus), angle of view, and even camera location to become post processes.