Here is the newest effort, the most ambitious yet. Shot with Minolta 55mm f1.8 wide open, mounted on Sony A6000 via dumb adapter (so about 82mm on APSC), 130 images in total. It was an experiment, I deliberately shot a lot of frames in order to create a really wide FOV with a lot of things to observe and (eventually) appreciate.
This second image is roughly a quarter-crop from this initial panorama. Having just one object (or just one small group of objects) in focus instead of a horizontal plane of focus across the image, at least to my eyes, enhances the effect of shallow DOF (even though the DOF is exactly the same, just cropped). Or is it because the focused object is bigger in the frame that the eye can easily perceive the difference between sharp and blurred parts of the image?
I feel that there is a certain point when going wider and adding more frames to pano starts to work against the desired effect. I discussed this with Edward Noble, the spiritus movens behind Bokeh Pano group on Facebook and here on Flickr and in his experience, that point seems to fall somewhere around the number of frames reaching the half of the focal length used – so up to 40 frames for 85mm and around 70 for 135mm. I’ll keep an eye on it to see if it can be a basic guideline similar to minimal shutter-speed one can hand-hold with a certain lens, for example.
