I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. For 30 years, the best camera anybody I knew owned was a Kodak. Kodak cameras took pictures like this all the time - but they werenât art -they were just terrible quality pictures.
Now we have digital cameras that can give pin-sharp resolution every time, and people deliberately go out of their way to blur them.
Yeah I have no desire to fight the animals. If a planet has violent creatures I pretty much just get in my ship and go.
No rickety stairs. Believe it or not that little glass structure next to the solar panels is the top of a ladder!
This is the inside end of the tunnel, and halfway through the tunnel is a stack of cuboid rooms that goes all the way to the top.
Free freighter time 
Some analogue photographers declared blurriness an art form and worked with it â itâs easy to claim that a blurry background leads the onlookerâs eye to focus on the foreground, basically turning a bug into a feature. Then with digital photography, everything was always oversharp, and some people wanted the blurry âretroâ look back. So now this has become a digital artform - which company/game can create the best looking retro effect? 
I am not a photographer any more than most people who snap a shutter but, for me, the idea is to make it look as it would if I were actually there. The human eye can really only focus on what it is looking at. Other things around that are therefore, âout of focusâ. In the case of the pic we are discussing, it is a third-person shot so the idea is that someone else is there( in this case, the viewer) . The two of us are focused on the rising sun. Since my character is not the focus, I am therefore, out of focus.
I might add that this is also a way to include others on my NMS journey. By placing myself in the photo but focusing the camera on something else, the pics are not about me rather, they are about the shared experience.
I need to be careful what I say here. Humour is easily misinterpreted - but if you say âThis is a joke!! 
â then it stops being a joke.
Itâs one of those unfortunate facts of human culture. If you say âThis is funnyâ, then itâs no longer funny.
I am aware of the whole âBokehâ argument. I have watched it grow over the last 10 years or so with some bemusement. Back in the day, it was called âdepth of fieldâ, and professional photographers did seek to manipulate it to their advantage. Properly used, in the right circumstances, it can be an effective method of directing the viewerâs attention.
Back in the 60s and 70s, most ordinary people couldnât afford a good camera. Good cameras were expensive.
Most ordinary people had Kodak Instamatics. They were (relatively) cheap. They were horribly poor quality. If you took photographs outdoors, in sunshine, with the sun behind you, you could sometimes get a decent picture. Otherwise the results were extremely unpredictable.
It wasnât just the cameras that caused problems. There were different film manufacturers - Kodak, Ilford, Konica, Agfa, Fuji - and they all used different chemistries. Commercial âholiday snapâ processors couldnât afford to process all these different film separately, so the industry came up with a sort of universal developer, known in the trade as âThe Soupâ. The Soup would produce some sort of image from all film brands - but it wouldnât produce a good quality image from any of them.
Then thereâs the film itself. Film has a shelf-life. It deteriorates faster with temperature - professionals kept their film in the fridge, used it in strict rotation, and had it processed immediately after exposure. Ordinary Joe Public couldnât afford to do that. We kept the film in the camera until it was all used up - which could be six months or more.
So we would send our films off for processing. And weeks later they would come back. Uncle Albert at his birthday party would be a blurred blob. Grass would be purple, and faces would be green. Aunt Mimi would look as though someone had lit a bonfire on her nose. They were dreadful pictures - but by golly, they had Bokeh in abundance.
I got your unannounced joke. Was laughing. Your sense of humor is one of the highlights here on this forum. 
Who knowsâŚmaybe this whole Bokeh craze comes from the old cameras and the horrible results. 
We are living in a world of heavily nostalgia driven media, so there might be something to that⌠
If I said âthis is a jokeâ no one would believe me. Iâve only pulled humor off a hand full of times, and most of them were mistakes.
Or a way to commercialize / justify your $2000 fast lens over the competitors (or another $50 prime lens). âMore pleasing bokeh,â what ever that means to you. Bokeh as I understand it references the quality / attributes of the blur that you are stuck with, particularly with faster lenses. You get DOF blurring for free
Old cameras had overall blur due to cheaper lenses that didnât focus well, not really the same effect as depth of field. They were also relatively slow giving worse results in darker areas or with moving subjects.
NMSâs DOF seems to go from off to on fairly fast, too fast for me on most of the shots that I have taken. But it does have its place with âportraitâ shots or where the background is far enough away as to hide the transition. All based on my experience on the PS4, Iâm sure that there are some processing speed considerations on the older platforms, other platforms may vary. IDK.
Okay, that was funny.
Yes, some results of the gameâs focus changes can make the scene appear to be a diorama of a toy (starship, for example).
But used well, as a true photography technique, bokeh can add an abstract look to distant mountains, sky, and mountaintop silhouettes.
Even an amateur photographer can want to reduce background visual distractions by using depth of field. An example photo of mine is below.
Bokeh is a great technique when used right.
What youâve shown there is a good example of the use of depth of field. You use a very fast shutter speed - which then requires a wide aperture - and the wide aperture reduces the distance you can focus. If you then focus on a nearby object, the background will blur out. The technique has been around forever - but in the past, you could only do it with a reasonably good camera.
The cheap cameras sold in the sixties couldnât do it, because they were fixed focus, fixed aperture, and fixed shutter speed. Nevertheless, they managed to blur things. A lot.
I first became aware of the term Bokeh about 10 years ago - but only in very specialist contexts. Then, suddenly, about 2 years ago, for some reason it became really trendy, and everybody was saying it.
But effects achieved by control of depth of field have been around at least since the 1880s.
Thatâs art! I am tempted to ask you to come to my base and take pictures for me. Mine are always obviously âjust a screenshot.â
Yet again I am so pleased with having found this forum. As many times as I have searched âno manâs sky [blah blah blah]â I really donât understand how it never came up before.
Possibly the most legit picture I have captured 
Well, @SingularGleam just settled the bokeh debate. 
