2011/05/01

Lawn furniture


Lawn furniture, originally uploaded by john m flores.

One of the myths of M43 is that the sensor is so small that you can't really get out-of-focus areas. In the kingdom of bokeh, medium format is king, followed by full-frame/35mm, APS-C, M43.

Truth told, I was skeptical as well when I first got the camera, particularly shooting with the 14-140. The 20mm F1.7 does a nice job of blurring the background, particularly with creating a 3-D effect at certain distances and apertures. But I held out little hope for the zooms.

But I've been proven wrong. One of the reasons that I go to The Online Photographer regularly is that I learn things. And one of the things the Mike Johnston taught me is that sensor size is the least important factor in DOF. Most important is camera to subject distance vs. camera to background distance, as this photo shows.

So, a relatively slow zoom can give you pleasing OOF under certain conditions. Good to know...

3 comments:

  1. Could you link me to the post because I'm a little curious.

    I agree that DOF is very do-able with smaller sensors. The only problem is the difficulty in filling the frame, for example with trying to capture shallower DOF when you want to do more than a close head-shot.

    Cheers

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  2. Here you go, Ray H:

    http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2009/06/depthoffield-hell.html

    http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2009/06/depth-of-field-hellthe-sequel.html

    http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2009/07/depth-of-field-hell-the-coda.html

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  3. Anonymous6:50 AM

    great posts

    ReplyDelete