Does short DOF help making good picture?

Regarding Steve McCurry's famous shot, is there a way to have meters long DOF with a 105mm lens focused at 1.5m?
 
^---especially when trying to keep your shutter speed fast when shooting Kodachrome in flat light!
 
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Well, good thing he wasn't limited to "but my DOF...oh, my DOF..." and he thought about the bigger picture rather than a very narrow (no pun intended, again) gear philosophy that would have handicapped him out of that photo.
 
I think this trend might have to do with dslrs becoming affordable in recent years. You get many people who get their dslr, and all of a sudden they have this new tool that was impossible with a point and shoot. We're talking about people who were introduced to photography after film "was dead." I know when I first got my dslr part of the cool factor was that I could get bokeh. Maybe this trend has happened before, but not in this generation.

I have found that since using my iiic I shoot at f9 more than any other aperture.

-jakub
 
Gabriel M.A. said:
"Rely"?
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Yes, really. Please note that I was not speaking in absolute terms. Of course there are some great photos that rely on very shallow DoF. But my contention is that it's a relatively small fraction.

Where shallow DoF is truly useful is under professional conditions, where in many many cases getting a straightforward and usable image reliably trumps all other priorities. But most often this has more to do with commerce than with art.
 
Gabriel M.A. said:
Well, good thing he wasn't limited to "but my DOF...oh, my DOF..." and he thought about the bigger picture rather than a very narrow (no pun intended, again) gear philosophy that would have handicapped him out of that photo.
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I think you're arguing against a position that no one here has articulated.
 
It's simply a matter of the technology available now, vs then. Now we have live view focusing in low cost devices that focus more accurately than passive small RF setups and are less susceptible to mechanical glitches.

I have shot hundreds of rolls with a Noctilux (50/1 E60), and you can use the F1 for shallow DOF, but you can also focus it at infinity and get a great photos. You couldn't do this with the Canon 0.95 from the '50s, it is too low contrast wide open.

If live view focusing magnified focus technology were available 50 years ago, we would have seen "bokeh shots" as commonly as we do now. IMHO.
 
I do not believe that even the most recent Noctilux to have a shorter DOF than the 85/1.8 lens on the Ermanox of 1924... The f1.5 Sonnars were available before the WWII...
 
I like it all... in focus, out of focus, blurry, perfectly stopped motion, motion blur, sharp, razor thin depth of field, every single thing in the photo in perfect focus, etc. If it works, it works. If it doesn't, it doesn't.
 
right

right

but there was no means to focus it right, especially with the shift and all, and the copies and materials issues. To get the accuracy that live view provides today, you'd have to focus bracket a roll of 36 exposures and that took time and expense that few wanted to expend back then.

BobYIL said:
I do not believe that even the most recent Noctilux to have a shorter DOF than the 85/1.8 lens on the Ermanox of 1924... The f1.5 Sonnars were available before the WWII...
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haha

haha

When the wind is blowing just right, one can get lucky with a RF and the 75 lux 😉

263271810_74XZn-L.jpg


ferider said:
Except when focusing with the 75 Lux on the RD1, Ted, right ? 🙂
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semilog said:
You do realize that no one on this thread has taken that extreme position, don't you?
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I do, which is why I explicitly said the opposite rather than attribute it to someone in this thread. I have seen statements along this line in other threads on the topic here though in the past.

Okay, so we've established that a somewhat blurred background around f/2.8-4 isn't triggering the 'too much bokeh' response. So where can someone draw a line? I'm guessing we can't. And as a result, any arguments here will be circular.

Good photos which use shallow depth of field will be acknowledged to be good photos making good use. Examples which are poor photos will have it blamed on the shallow dof. Fine art work, abstracts, etc will likely be ignored as outside the scope of images here. 😉
 
I still don't think there's any real "trend" towards shallow DoF, but you may be on to something re: a new crop of serious amateur photographers & photo enthusiasts. I was once talking to 1 of my bosses @ work a few years ago, & he mentioned that like many young men in his generation (Baby Boomers), he caught the photography bug while he was serving in the military because of easy access to (relatively) cheap, high-quality equipment from Japan via the PX. While in this serious photo phase of his life (eventually supplanted by marriage, children, & golf), he recalled how he & his buddies got all excited about exploring the creative possibilities provided by their new fancy gear, including the ability to limit DoF. And judging from flickr, today's newbie photo enthusiasts (as opposed to regular people taking snaps w/their cellphones, etc.) also seem to take a lot of portrait & macro shots, both of which tend to have shallow DoF. I'm sure I would have done more of those types of shots when I 1st started out if I had gotten into SLRs rather than RFs. 😉

bukaj said:
I think this trend might have to do with dslrs becoming affordable in recent years. You get many people who get their dslr, and all of a sudden they have this new tool that was impossible with a point and shoot. We're talking about people who were introduced to photography after film "was dead." I know when I first got my dslr part of the cool factor was that I could get bokeh. Maybe this trend has happened before, but not in this generation.

I have found that since using my iiic I shoot at f9 more than any other aperture.

-jakub
Click to expand...
 
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