It really isn’t hard to get narrow depth of field out of an APS-C sensor. It is in no way essential to use a full frame body to shoot flowers with the background completely blurred.
If you look at the EXIF data, you’ll see that I shot that at f/16. At f/2.8 the background was just a brownish-grey soup. Crop sensors are entirely adequate for nearly any sort of photography.
Even better than that:
this sunflower
(The white background is the side of my house, which is not as flat and featureless as the picture would suggest. The picture was taken with an aperture of f/6.3 and a zoom lens at the focal length of 200 mm.)
There’s no reason a casual or enthusiast photographer needs a full frame camera. There are some nice advantages, but at the price point they’re not aimed at most folks and the extra capability isn’t going to make a significant difference.
The exception is the Sony FF cameras which are significantly cheaper, but I’m not sold on them over Canikkon yet.
Yes, but if you do have a FF camera and the 50mm f/1.4 lens, you can do this.
Are you saying you can’t get Bokeh like that with a crop sensor camera?
Easy to get that with an f/1.4 lens on a crop body too. You just have to use a longer focal length (though this changes the perspective somewhat). That makes for more subject isolation anyways, though, which is presumably what you’re after with the narrow depth of field as well. Manipulating camera-subject-background distances (subject closer to the camera, more distance to background) will also result in a background thrown further out of focus, as any macro shooter can tell you. Again this changes composition somewhat. The ridiculously narrow depth of field effect is often ridiculously overdone anyways. It’s distracting if eyes are in focus but the nose is blurry and detracts from a portrait, imho.
Where you really potentially gain with a large sensor is in improved signal-to-noise ratios and dynamic range - but that only when looking at sensors from the same generation. I believe the new 7D crop sensor beats the old 5D (not 5DMkII) full frame sensor in both categories.
No, I just thought we had gotten to the point in this thread where everyone starts showing off.
It’s not a factor of the sensor size, but of the lens aperture and iris shape. (One of the prized features of Canon’s L series lenses is their iris is circular at all sizes, rather than hexagonal or some other shape with angles, so the bokeh is smooth.
I will try to remember to put up an example or two tonight once I get home.
Other lenses will produce a more lumpy sort of bokeh, and in extreme cases, the bokeh will appear to be more like donuts rather than spots.
As a handful of people have already said - it’s all in the glass. The camera body just hold the lens.
That a frequent truism that is trotted out, but it was probably a lot more spot on in the days of film than it is today. The steady advance of digital sensor technologies in particular ( and also other features as well ), makes this less true in digital bodies. While glass probably still trumps bodies ( and photography skill trumps both ), bodies do make some real difference in this day and age.
Yes, the same piece of glass will give different results in front of an 8MB crop sensor and a 25MB full-frame sensor. Back in the days of film, all 35mm cameras would take all kinds of 35mm film, and the kind of film you used could make a lot of difference.
Works for me. 