Huge DOF vs Bokeh

[Mitch Alland]

To me, a "touch of bokeh" as you put it is frequently all an image needs. However, with wide angle shots, a small sensor camera frequently renders no bokeh whatsoever, which can compromise the sense of depth. For example, here is an image of mine (sorry, posted this before but I think it works as an example here) with the GX100 at 24mm, where I think a bit of blur in the distance would have been an improvement...

The first picture I posted above — the o-o-f samlor and the infocus cactus has the type of smooth blur that that most people would call "good bokeh". Nevertheless, I don't like the picture now because, as I said, I find it trite and gimmicky. In contrast, here is a Summilux-50 — pre-ASPH of course! — shot at f/1.4 whose bokeh I like and find effective in the structure of the composition:

What I like a about the 40mm tele-converter is that if you take a portrait at f/2.4 in which the subject is, say, 1–1.5m away you get the "touch of bokeh" that I like, as in the portrait I posted above.

But there are other ways than blurring the background of isolating the subject: one way is to burn in what you want to de-emphasize, as I have done with the man in the GX100/ISO 800 picture below that I posted in another thread. So man does not need to live by bokeh alone — a technique that I learned by looking at lot of Moriyama Daido photographs, which are often heavily manipulted: sometimes so heavily and obviously that you realize that he is saying, "hey, this is a photograph not the real thing" like Magrittle's painting Ceci n'est pas une pipe.

—Mitch/Bangkok
http://www.flickr.com/photos/10268776@N00/