Jon Tarrant
Jon Tarrant’s pictures first appeared in AP more than 30 years ago promoting his one-man exhibition at The Camera Club in central London. He has written several books and numerous articles for a variety of photographic publications.
Face-recognition modes that allow AF systems to identify people in pictures are based on a simple general rule: the most important part of a picture should always be fully sharp. If there are people in the picture then they are generally the most important feature and the AF system therefore prioritises those areas. Of course, there are times when this rule can be broken to great effect and there is nothing wrong with a foreground person being out-of-focus, or even in silhouette, if this provides good framing for the scene beyond.
There are many factors that are considered when choosing lenses but rarely do they include the rendering of out-of-focus areas. Most of the time, as face recognition algorithms prove, we are more concerned with the things that are in-focus than the areas that aren’t. This is a shame because the out-of-focus quality of an image, commonly known as bokeh, can add to a photograph’s overall effect if it is handled well.
Bokeh is specifically the softness that occurs away from the plane of sharp focus. Although it is most commonly associated with background elements, bokeh refers to the overall appearance of all the out-of-focus areas in a photographic image and is often a hard-to-define quality that gives one lens greater appeal over another. The most common bokeh signature is soft circular highlights but its true potential only becomes apparent when considering ways
