Crop sensor cameras get a bad rap. Lenses with an f/4 minimum aperture get a bad rap. Neither provide the buttery-smoother blurred background and intense subject isolation that an f/1.2 lens on a full frame camera can. But that doesn’t mean they can’t produce nice images, even in combination.
The image above was taken of my very photogenic cat with my D500 and Nikon 24 – 120mm f/4 lens. While the background is certainly still visible, I think it’s nicely blurred out, even given the f/6 equivalent aperture on this crop-sensor camera. Jack separates nicely from the background and you can see individual strands of fur sticking out.
This is accomplished by a few things. First, the 86mm focal length I’ve zoomed to helps to compress the image and flattens the background. Second, I was relatively close to him, which increases the background blur. Third, our kitchen is pretty deep and he was right at the edge of it: the further away the background, the more it blurs. He’s also at the absolute corner of the counter and I took the image at an angle, which ensured that the backsplash on the wall coming toward the front of the kitchen was still blurred nicely.
Now I’d love to say that I planned this shot, but I didn’t. I was playing around with my 24 – 120mm lens and Jack happened to be sitting like this. I didn’t place him or calculate where I was going to stand; I just framed him off-center and took the shot. I didn’t realize how nice it looked until after I looked at it. Heck, I didn’t even remove that remote from under him. I did change the image to black and white to hide it 😉
Relatively Ambitious 