Waiting for the ferry on the way to Whistler, I took a few shots of our daughter climbing about at a playground in her bulky but colourful whiter clothes. Trying to avoid the ordinary (read: “boring”) look of playground snapshots, I aimed for a very shallow depth of field (DOF) using a Canon EF 35mm f/1.4L USM lens
. This lens has recently became my main walk-around lens, replacing a Canon EF 24-105mm f/4 L IS USM
in this role. At first I was skeptical – I thought that if I would be limited to a single focal length, all photos from that shoot would look largely the same. However, I now think that shallow DOF provided by f 1.4 compensates for the absence of zoom, and the images actually look more interesting than those taken at f4. I am beginning to agree with a friend of mine, who said that if an image does not have a shallow DOF it does not look “special” (his background is in portrait photography; this does not apply apply to landscape, for example).
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