Originally posted by frank Thanks for the link. Really enjoy the reading. It's good to see that I'm not the only one that think a photo w/ super-thin-DOF doesn't really mean much except the 'first' look. As a matter of fact I just changed my m4/3 system to a P&S camera because my wife and kids want to see more background in their photos, not some blur blur abstracts ...
My recent tips to Melaka and Indonesia, I had the same experience.
I needed that DOF to convey the surrounding in context.
Whether it be shots of the people, the places, I generally needed some DOF rather than none.
Maybe not to the point where everything was sharp, but enough DOF to show the surroundings for people shots while shallow enough to get some isolation.
On a larger format, for the same FOV/DOF, I would have had to stop down and up the ISO.
It would have meant little if the people shots all had very shallow DOF. They could well have been my backyard and not another country.
For personal/family shots and local environments, I can understand the need for shallow DOF (since we are familiar with them and there is less need to show the surroundings), but after being directed to the fantastic work by Bill Gekas of his daughter with a 16-45, it certainly leads me to think about the TOP article again.
Bill Gekas Photography | The Gallery