Always on the lookout for nice florals, I found some hostas that promised a nice image in the backyard. The image contained all the elements that I like for bokeh shots: a strong subject, good color contrasts, and elements in various planes to produce a graduation between in-focus and out-of-focus areas. As soon as I shot the image with several different lenses, I decided to get a little crazy and shoot it with a bunch of lenses, so that I could more fully compare and understand their rendering characteristics and overall look. I spent several hours changing lenses and here is the result: a comparison of 36 different lenses known for their bokeh. Some are normal lenses used on 35mm cameras, some are lenses for scientific purposes, some are cine lenses and some projection lenses, all adapted for my Sony A7RII.
It is important to understand that this is no sort of rigorous test. I did not set the camera on a tripod and try to reproduce the same shot 37 times. In any case, that would not have been very instructive, since these lenses were of different focal lengths and different apertures. In addition the light changed over the course of the afternoon, making strict comparison shots impractical. What I wanted was to take each lens and use its particular characteristics to find and capture the best image I could. I find some of these shots more pleasing and satisfying than others, and there are variations in color balance and exposure as well, but overall I feel that they clearly show the unique bokeh and rendering characteristics of the different lenses, and are a testament to just how different lenses can be and still produce a nice image.
For information, I have added text at the bottom left of the images detailing the lenses used. I have galleries for all these lenses so that if you wish, you can navigate to them see other images taken with each lens.
