It doesn't look unpleasant to me .... I really don't get this 'bokeh' stuff. I agree in the picture of the berry the out of focus bits detract ... but it's ok
I think it's another internet photography meme ... bokeh, sharpness, megapixels ...
Still, you've got to be happy with your own photos. But I'd suggest no one would care too much about your fuzzy bits ;-)
Well, the photo of those berries (crabapples, actually) is only a test shot of sorts, altho I've got similar shots which have much greater visual appeal. What it does is show that if you are
counting on this lens to provide a smoothly burred out of focus area it may not always be able to provide it.
Sometimes we want or need to have the busy, finely structured portion of a composition deliberately blurred by the lens in such a way that it becomes part of the overall composition, and as such, you may want more control over how it will look. This is just one of the reasons for using fast, large aperture lenses.
I wish I had my old 200mm prime with me at the same time for the same shot.
I can describe how it would have rendered the same scene. Using the same shallow focus zone, the prime would have been slightly softer. Foreground and background elements, as you move farther away from the focal plane, would progressively and smoothly get more blurred until they disappeared into each other and the backlight, adding only a hint of tone or shading.
That would have left the cluster of apples almost floating in space in appearance. Which was the effect I was hoping the EF 70-200 2.8 L IS 2 would have provided. The lens renders the focus area with tremendous accuity, but I am not satisfied with the out of focus part of the image.
Unfortunately, i need to be satisfied with the
whole image to find it useful. This is actually something that older lenses are often better at; what they lack in sharpness is offset by often smoother bokeh.
Actually, some cheaper lenses will also do this in a more balanced way too. There are a lot of variables.
