[normhead]

If you use you hyper-focal point an ƒ22 to get everything from 6 ft to infinity in focus on your 50mm lens.... there is no blur/bokeh/out of focus area, none, zilch, nada, null set, zero, bagelled.... I'd say that affects background blur more than a little bit. It exterminates it, makes it irrelevant, a memory, a history lesson, irrelevant, part of the next class,....

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Last edited by normhead; 02-06-2015 at 04:39 PM.

[CypherOz]

This for a pictorial example... New To Photography:Full Frame vs APS-C/DX crop factor w/example - AusPhotography:: Australia's Premier Photography Forum::

[hjoseph7]

Bokeh is actually completely determined by the lens design (focal length, aperture blades, elements) and distance to focus and to background (objects that turn to bokeh).
You will get the most bokeh at minimum focus distance and widest aperture. This is why macro is so challenging - at extremely close MFD, the DoF is incredibly shallow, and bokeh is "huge"!

On to differences between FF and APSC. The bokeh is actually exactly the same, if you use the same lens and focus setting. It will be different if you use different lenses (different focal length, but equivalent FoV) or if you move the camera (further or closer, to get the same framing). But if everything is the same, the bokeh will be the same - except that on crop sensor part of the edges will be cropped. This gives the illusion that the magnification is higher, so bokeh balls can appear to cover more of the frame.

One more thing about calculated DoF.. in my experience, the old zone focusing and DoF scales on film-era lenses no longer apply in digital cameras. This is mostly because the resolution of digital sensors is very high, and also our expectations of detail and sharpness is very high these days. DoF was the area that is "adequately" sharp to be considered "in focus". What used to be adequate in the past, on a different medium (film), is no longer necessarily adequate with our standards now, with the new medium (digital sensors with high pixel density). This is why those DoF calculations have to be taken with much reserve. Try them out sometime, see if they satisfy you.

Actually I shot 1000's of portraits outdoors working for this company. When we started shooting with digital/cropped cameras we had to move the subject 10-15 feet further away from the background.

[Rondec]

If you have enough blur, all lenses are equal. Super-close up macros always have backgrounds that just melt back and are smooth. The problem is what lenses do with middling distances where you can still identify shapes, but things are kind of blurred. Some lenses start throwing up messy lines or donuts or hexagons all over the place that just doesn't look good at all and distracts from the final photo. That would be what I refer to as bad bokeh. But certainly it isn't related to sensor size, but rather to lens design.

[clackers]

Yeah, the famous/infamous bokeh characteristics - rounded v polygon, mad Biotar/Russian swirls in specular highlights, bokeh with purple and green fringes, mirror lens onion rings - are side effects of the lens design, and LBA sufferers seek them out because they're distinctive.

[mrNewt]

Yeah, the famous/infamous bokeh characteristics - rounded v polygon, mad Biotar/Russian swirls in specular highlights, bokeh with purple and green fringes, mirror lens onion rings - are side effects of the lens design, and LBA sufferers seek them out because they're distinctive.

You forgot the doughnuts...