A long lens

After reading Lindsay Dobson’s review of her Panasonic 100-300mm lens, I thought: ok, all you “bokeh” lovers out there, go and get a long lens, and then get close.

We don’t have such a long one, but I borrowed Mitchie’s adapter and her 40-150mm 43rds lens and mounted the combination onto my E-PL1 “Pen”. Then I did like I just thought and set the lens to its longest setting of 150mm and used it wide open and close to some plants:

So here you have an outdoor and an indoor shot. In the first one, the other chilies in the background were less than one and a half meter away, the second photo blurs our wallpaper behind the orchid into nothingness. Of course longer is better if you’re after wildlife like Lindsay, but you get the idea. So this is an argument to get those “double kit zoom” packages which are often offered with cameras – without ever getting a real large aperture lens, you can still get some of these blurry backgrounds if you wish.

If you want to calculate your area of in- or out-of-focus before taking the shot, try something like the depth of field calculator.

Update, from the same evening: oh wow. Just as I was telling you something about a shallow depth of field, up comes Thorsten Overgaard and shows us what’s possible with his 50mm Noctilux (with an aperture of 1:0,95)…

Thanks for reading.