Manual focus I keep for film, I feel like it's a part of the process.

But I do wish my Sony 50 was a little less noisy/slow. Suppose I should pick up the GM version at some point.

I've got the 7A 35mm f/1.2 in M43 which is pretty nice for a walkaround lens.

I'd probably opt for the 50mm f/1.2 since it's 1/3 the price of the f/1.05 (£90 vs £260 for the M43 mount) if I didn't already have double-digit number of 50s in PK mount that I use with an adapter (and they're surprisingly good for 30-50 year old lenses.)

(I've got a 7A 10mm f/3.5 that I've not really got around to using much but now the UK is heading into Fake Summer, there's more light to make it useful.)

There have been significant advances in mainland china made scopes in the last 5-7 years as well. For instance the Arken EP5 5-25x56, 34mm tube first focal plane. Which until recent tariffs and things sold for around $400 to 500 USD shipped. No it's not as good as a $1299 or $2199 Vortex, but it's definitely not the junk-tier stuff that was completely disregarded by everyone who wanted something usable on a budget for >500 yards.

I have found TTArtisans 50mm f0.95 to be quite nice.

pinhole camera and an insane amount of light.

Or, multiple exposures and HDR.

Shoot at a higher fstop with a sensor with a high native ISO, like 12,800.

Focus stacking.

Shoot at f/64

Shoot at high f numbers - as high as the lens will take without inducing diffraction.

Shoot with smaller sensors and step down your lens. The bigger the sensor the shallower the depth of field at given f-stop. For example when shooting with an APS-C camera at f2.8 you're going to get the same amount of light on the sensor but less background blur than when shooting on a "full frame" camera at the same f-stop. So if stepping down the lens is not an option because there's not enough light you can still get a little bit less background separation and blur when shooting with APS-C or MFT cameras. Also the wider the lens the less background separation you get. 135mm lens at f2.8 is going to have razor thin depth of field while a wide angle 28mm is going to get way more in focus. Also hyperfocal distance. With wide angle lenses you can get pretty much everything from few meters away all the way to infinity in focus at the same time. That's why (I think) all phone lenses are wide angle.

Get a nikon j1/v1.

Doesn’t that remove the narrow depth of focus the author is going for?

To be honest, if that's not the part where physics fail, it's going to be the actual production of the lenses... Either way, there's no such lens available to the market.

This is an option I wanted to experiment with, but when I decided to use it for the short film it died off in my mind. (I even checked how many fps we'd get with a scanner...)

> we're so obsessed with shallow depth-of-field as a sign of "quality" and/or meaning

It's not necessarily a sign of "quality", but it is something we see less often, which makes it more interesting. Phone cameras can't do shallow depth of field, for example.

And of course, the human eye also has a limited DoF range. It is interesting to see things in a way that we cannot directly perceive.

The harder to achieve has prestige due to rarity. When the rarity goes away the prestige makes whatever the item was highly popular before the prestige fades. Then the older form becomes more rare and valued by some, in a manner not quite the same as prestige but as a sort of decerning choice.

White bread did this, as did purple dye, and synthetic materials.

The advances of modern AF and focus pulling systems truly has led to a world of consequences in amateur and even professional film making. In a world where anyone can take half decent video with the phone they always have, its a sign of "I have dedicated hardware to have taken this". The chase for toneh https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQ8VodC19-g

Not only do many see it as a sign of quality, it lets you ignore the set and stage more than ever. Imperfections? Anomalies? Bah they're blurred out of recognition. Of course it can be used still mindfully and tastefully however such nuance is ever more rare.

Most of my cameras both digital and film alike are medium format. While I'm more of a photographer than someone who does much with video it pains me to have to remind people regularly, just because I can get insanely shallow DoF with the creamiest bokeh they've seen doesn't mean it always makes sense to. Theres a story to be told with foregrounds and backgrounds, and how they can be used to guide the viewer.

Isn't it also related to wanting images to appear how we would see them in person? Our eyes blur everything we aren't looking at directly, don't they?

Technically the images look great, very impressive. Production-wise I can also see how this could be useful for low-budget interior dialogue scenes where you don't want the set dressing to distract. It really draws focus to the actors and lets the director paint a more impressionistic backdrop.

The exterior shots I've got more mixed feelings about. I think these shallow lenses work best when you have a very controlled backdrop that can be deliberately staged. Using it in a wide outdoor shot feels like a real risk unless you're doing some Kubrickian blocking to make sure everyone is arranged just-so. Or you're making them stand stock-still.

> we're so obsessed with shallow depth-of-field as a sign of "quality" and/or meaning.

Nicco here. I didn't use a shallow depth of field here for either reason. I wanted it because all of those scenes are memories of years ago compared to the main events. Thus, I wanted to give the feeling of details blurring out as memories fade. By contrast, I shot the main events at ~f8 on the Helios, so the background is quite sharp.

They also keep saying definitively instead of definitely :)

Well, obviously large format cameras are nothing new. The point here is: for these kind of apertures and wide angles we need a super large area to expose, and usually either (a) they're smaller with digital cameras, or (b) they use film and thus cannot record videos. This is specifically the approach that uses a depth of field adapter to be able to record videos on these, which is also not new (I provided references at the end of the article), but it is quite rare! Also, each design of there depth of field adapters is quite different and I think it's interesting to see the differences between them all.