Slack of Focus in a Sports Bar

Somehow, an epiphany on photography came to me while in a sports bar.

Not one to frequent such places, but one such establishment recently opened down the street. Promoting their “chef driven menu” two of us decided to stop by for happy hour. We were seated on the open-air upper deck, a view to the mountains on one side but a plethora of gigantic flat panel displays visible to the other. Several home theater-sized screens presented that day’s episode of ESPN’s “SportsCenter” studio-based sports talker.

I never watch this stuff normally. A couple years ago we cut the cord because Comcast, and later DISH network, kept forcing unwanted sports programming down our throats and escalating our monthly bill to cover their increasing programming fees. Enough was enough, we bought a Roku box with "no commercials" options to Hulu and Netflix. "Screw you, Comcast, always the United Airlines of cable consumer customer service."

But this kitchen was slow and the service lagged and my eyes drifted to the big screens. These things pushed all limits of current flat panel tech ... I have friends with driveways smaller than these monsters. Disinterested in the muddled verbal content of SportsCenter, my attention pulled me to the compromised clutter of the ESPN studio set design.

The set design itself not much, a very high-tech desk and behind it a matrix of very large flat panel displays, matrixed to show a cacophony of graphics and stats and athlete head shots and game clips, all dissolving and morphing like a sack full of cats. Fonts and and logos swirl and transmogrify faster than chameleons on amphetamines. All this as ESPN studio personalities sit and yammer among themselves. 

This was the premium content for which ESPN and Comcast so dearly bill each month?

Their studio production not a “set piece” in the traditional design sense, instead more a camera pointed at giant studio monitors displaying motion graphic content that could have just as simply been pushed out directly to viewer homes from the CG generator itself. ESPN was apparently insisting I watch my screen, fed from their camera pointed at another ESPN screen. Live human "hosts" reduced to clutter trapped between the studio camera and what that camera was REALLY capturing, which was simply more screens. The traditional background had become the conceptual foreground. It looked awful. There was no focus. Or more literally, the focus was everywhere all at once.

It made me long for the old days, when a big news set filled the television studio. Where space and distance could be used creatively and artistically, because physical laws of light, lens and optics never change. With larger lenses and bigger cameras (depending on the level and intensity of the studio lighting) at normal distances something is in focus, and stuff in front or behind is out of focus or “soft” visually. Having the background fuzzy helps visually isolate and reinforce the newscaster or anchor. It mimics our real life experience where our brain and eyes concentrate attention on what we want to see, and diffuse our perception of the extraneous stuff. 

But laws of optics also demand that as lenses get tinier and tinier, this depth of field effect grows less and less pronounced. With any lens miniaturized enough, EVERYTHING captured appears in focus and sharp. This may be a good thing for amateurs with smartphones, but bad for traditional esthetics and tasteful scenic design.

Today, small cramped studios with a desk with a panorama of flat panels immediately behind is a solution both quick and cheap. And cheap is the enemy of good. A stylish physical space for a television news or sports show does not come with an Ikea price tag. Designing and building physical walls and columns and arches and backgrounds requires human labor and craftsmanship ... to do it well is expensive. Once management commits to such an expense, those costs have to be amortized over several years. Make no mistake, even a bevy of 8-foot LCDs is cheaper than physical studio construction. Plus anything, any image, any signal, any graphic can electronically feed these screens. Want a completely different set? Boom, new graphics, done deal.

But with the LCD wall background only a few feet behind hosts and the guests, everything now sits within the same field of focus. Screens can’t be selectively soft because they’re too close to the talent. And besides, says the show’s producer, if we’re paying for all these graphics then by god, they’re gonna be sharp and not wasted as fuzzy, soft blobs floating somewhere behind the talent.  It’s become the new norm. Flat panels are versatile. Cheaper than physical set construction. Instantly changeable. What does it matter that the space and depth and selective focus that naturally go with it have disappeared?

Apparently it does matter. I ask you to consider that with great fanfare, Apple now offers with iOS 10.1 their “Portrait Mode” on iPhone models 7 Plus and higher. What does “Portrait Mode” do? It uses that regular “everything is sharp” iPhone photo from that nearly pinhole sized lens, and crunches it with software and algorithms to recreate the traditional depth-of-field effect. That same effect that happens naturally with larger lenses and formats now can be recreated via raw processing power. Irrelevant that what was once normally there now must be artificially restored because, as Apple puts it, “a beautiful new feature creates stunning photos … make your foreground subject sharp while creating a beautifully blurred background, also known as “bokeh” and previously only capable on DSLR cameras.” 

Wow. Just … wow. You don’t know what you’ve lost ‘til it’s gone. So now, the esthetic value of selective focus ... lost when lenses were miniaturized for smart phones ... can be restored or at least approximated via battery-draining computer processing. 

Will this mean that SportsCenter can invoke some semblance of artistic merit by applying software to “soften” the background and restore desirable beautifully blurred backgrounds to premium cable? Of course, the very same thing would happen automatically by just physically moving that wall of screens further away from the anchor desk. Moving the background so it’s actually “more in the background” allows simple optics to solve the visual problem.

But that’s the photographic revelation, that we’ve come to the point where an OS upgrade can insert what used to occur naturally. And until ESPN and all the other studio news and talk programs recognize their banal and disposable of pablum is merely filler between desperately overstuffed commercial blocks, then the larger problem of corporate focus will not disappear into the background anytime soon.