While f/64 sounds like a small aperture, it can be worth remembering that it was on large format cameras. A small sensor like on iPhone 6 is wide open corresponding to depth matching f/113!
(iPhone6 is f/2.2, crop is 7.21, 8"x10" camera is crop 0.14. 7.21/0.14*2.2 = f/113)
Worth noting that angular resolution and DOF/defocus is related to absolute aperture size, not f-number, so you can also just plug in the values for "f" to compare.
The iPhone 6 has f=4.15mm, a lens with similar FOV on an 8x10 has f=200mm.
200mm / 64 = 3.1mm -> the size of an f/64 aperture on a 200mm lens.
4.15mm / 2.2 = 1.9mm -> the size of on f/2.2 aperture on the iPhone 6.
Although the 8x10 will often have less defocus due to movements (photographer control of focal plane).
>but in general it refers to a style in which the photographer has somehow manipulated what would otherwise be a straightforward photograph as a means of "creating" an image rather than simply recording it.
I don’t know that sounds exactly like the Instagram and Snapchat generation to me.
That's a description of pictorialism, which the original comment is saying has won over realism.
Group f/64:
In part, they formed in opposition to the pictorialist photographic style that had dominated much of the early 20th century, but moreover, they wanted to promote a new modernist aesthetic that was based on precisely exposed images of natural forms and found objects. (wikipedia from OP link)
f.64 wasn't exactly about realism, either. Black and white film (though they didn't have much choice). Burning and dodging to add drama. Depth of field way beyond what eyes would perceive.
Your eyes adjust focus moving from object to object, so you won't see defocus the same way a camera will. If anything, things will usually look sharper with your eyes.
Virtually no lens that hits peak sharpness at f8/f11 (usually implies a lens with an imaging circle covering the 35mm/APS-C format size) will even stop down to f64, with virtually all of them the smallest aperture size will be f22.
These chaps where dealing with much larger formats and their corresponding larger lenses typically, the usual rules of thumb you might be familiar with from the majority of digital interchangeable lens systems or 35mm film don’t always apply. f64 would be fine on 8x10, as one example, and was often used on this format.
Now you’re comparing different sensor/negative sizes against each other. Usually ”full frame” (aka 135mm) diffraction starts to affect on smaller f-values (larger aperture) but on larger negative sizes the diffraction starts to be a problem on bigger F-numbers (smaller apertures). On 4x5 format something like f/22 and on 8x10 f/45.
As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, diffraction depends on the physical wavelength of visible light and the absolute, not relative, size of the aperture. f numbers are relative. A really big lens can be f/64 and still comfortably above the diffraction limit.
Ironically, an ultra high depth-of-field isn't realistic.
In computer graphics, simulating low depth of field (background and foreground blurred, while subject in focus) is a considered an advancement in realism.
On the other hand, many games simulate lens flare too.
I kind of wonder if there are not other "actually realistic" avenues that haven't been pursued. For example, simulating floaters.
I also found it funny playing some first-person shooters in 3d and/or VR. Although it would make sense to have these effects when using a sniper rifle, you can use a sniper rifle without closing one eye! ha!
You can use gun sights in the real world while keeping both eyes open (and some schools of thought recommend it for situational awareness). It's not even that hard so long as your dominant eye is the one looking through the sights, and you don't get wink fatigue either.
I suspect the VR game isn't correctly simulating what this actually looks like, though.
If a subject has floaters, they will be there when viewing a VR scene with goggles, and will move in the right ways when moving the head and eyes; there is no need to waste cycles on that.
It’s arguably more typically considered an advancement in the realism of simulating a real life camera with an optical lens. Not the same thing as simulating human visual perception more realistically.
Games are trying to look more like movies, hence new technologies to simulate shallow DoF, lens flare, anamorphic lens artifacts etc. None of these really help make the game world look more like how a human might perceive them, they do all help make the game look like how a typical movie camera might have perceived the scene.
For sure shallow DoF simulation _could_ be used to try and make games more human perception like, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen the effect used this way - it’s virtually always used to simulate optical bokeh/out of focus areas to look more film like.
In real life, whatever I look at is always in focus. It's actually very unrealistic to simulate depth of field without good eye tracking, because the user will end up looking at things that are simulated as out of focus but should actually be in-focus because the user is looking at them.
If you don't have good eye tracking, then rendering the entire scene in focus is most realistic, as whatever I look directly at will appear in focus and everything else is more peripheral and will be blurred a bit by my optical system anyway.
Computer games strive to look like movies, borrowing established means of expression and cliches from movies (specifically, Hollywood movies). This includes narrow depth of field in cutscenes, color keying by genre (usually orange and blue) and imitation of chemical film colors. AAA games look very unrealistic, but everyone is too accustomed to this look.
Static graphics, rendered with non real-time methods, usually imitate photos, so depth of field is added too. They tend to look more realistic than games.
Narrow depth of field occurs in human vision, like when looking at very close objects under well-lit conditions. (We have flexible lenses in our eyes for a reason, and when they don't work well, we have corrective lenses for a reason.)
The effect has been imitated in static rendering (e.g. raytracing) long before it appeared in games and full length animations.
It is a real-world optical effect that requires extra work to simulate; when that is not included in the algorithms, you get wide depth of field by default. Everything going back to Gouraud-shaded polygons and wire-frame is effectively wide depth of field.
> Contemporary photographic convention denotes lens apertures with a slash, such as ƒ/22 or ƒ/64, but in its writings the group always used a dot or period instead (as in "f.64").
Edit: then again at another point the article says:
> A small poster at the exhibition said:
>> Group ƒ/64 —
>>
>> ...
Either I'm misunderstanding something or the article is a bit confused.