I saw this photo on the National Geographic website and I thought to myself - with the smaller sized sensors to that of a Canon 1D-X or a 5DMKiii - is this kind of depth of field, at that distance, possible to do with let's say, my OM-D E-M5?



I imagine with the right adapter and lenses it would be, but I don't know. Any thoughts on kit set-up or technical limitations would be great. What would be amazing if anyone has taken a shot with similar depth of field and to share it here!

Thanks.

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Hmm probably the best native option would be the 75mm 1.8. Too new for enough sample pics to show off it's abilities though imho. Probably still couldn't blur that the background that much.

Possibly an adapted 85mm 1.4?

At the same distance, probably not. The DoF equivalent of a 300/2.8 or 400/2.8 on FF just doesn't exist for m4/3. At double the distance, easily.

But we're talking about $5000+ lenses here. That a dreadfully small niche.

DH

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That particular image would be quite easily achieved in Photoshop.

A carefully constructed mask, a little bit of gaussian blur, and tada!

In fact, the uniformity of the out of focus area, even as it goes further away, makes me suspect photoshop anyway.

Sure, if it is a 35mm camera, just adapt that lens to an m4/3 camera and stop down one stop.

You could probably approximate it using the Brenizer method provided you could get close enough to the subject (probably not advisable with the particular example you chose, though).

For the most part I'm with Dara, the application for this sort of lens is really pretty limited. We've got to leave SOME niches to allow the full frame (and larger) camp to justify their investments.

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No doubt this is with a fast telephoto - I'd bet my $600 tamron 300mm f2.8 could do something similar though, it doesn't need to cost $5K! (not that it couldn't easily though).

The more I look at that photo, the more it looks smeared and not out of focus. I am likely wrong, but is it possible there is digital blur added to the image? The foreground (bottom road) in particular looks very abrupt and quite sharp, evenly defined focus line.

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This looks sooo familiar that I suspect (s)he used Alien Skin Bokeh plug-in, and used the planar option (with selection on the big cat). I tried that once with the exact same effect - super abruptly bokeh'd foreground - and I didn't use it again. Should have known that it could land on NatGeo.

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Blow this up and look closely at the ears - definitely looks like blur added in PP.

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Interestingly, the DOF of a 300mm f2.8 wide open on FF from 30 feet is 0.5ft - this would actually be shallower than the apparent DOF shown in this image (the front to back of the jaguar appear to be within the focus area), but the out of focus fall-off would be much more gradual than what is shown. The look this image has is almost more of a medium to large format portrait than a telephoto animal shot.

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