Hey, I'm a new X10 owner and had a question about DOF.

I've been messing around with the Fuji X10 and trying to get a feel for how to best use it.

It takes great photos and the thing is for sharp, true vibrant colors and produce fairly well balance pic, it's automated features work great.

That stated, I've been trying to play with DOF and it's a tricky business with the smaller sensor and zoom feature.

On one end, for super macro mode where you can get within 1cm of an object and have super crisp closeups, it needs to be at widest angle, but it has sharp pic with great bokeh in the background. Going towards more "normal" field of view like 35-50mm (equivalent), at widest aperture of f/2.2, the bokeh isn't that great, if much to show. however, extending zoom to 85mm, you start to get some pretty good bokeh effect and the aperture max is about f/2.5 (I think).. then at the maximum zoom of 112mm, it's wideopen at f/2.8 and actually has the best bokeh and quite nice.

Maybe I haven't fully grasped all the concepts and factors between sensor size vs focal length vs crop factor.. you would think at max zoom, it would have least amount of bokeh compared to the shorter 50mm or 35mm range.. generally getting bokeh from full extended zoom is impossible on most compact cameras, but I guess the X10 is designed well to handle such effects.

In addition to fast lens, I guess you also need a decent focal length in relation to the particular sensor size of the camera... the 35-50mm equivalent on the 2/3 cmos censor is just not quite enough focal length even though I can get f/2.2.. need to extend out to 112 with f/2.8 to maximize the bokeh effect.. though. The range where it is effective is less than 10 meters, any further and shallow dof is gone. But, I guess you never really need to take a wide far away shot with bokeh, anyways.

It's weird, I would think you should be able to get bokeh from almost any length, but it seems to jump or skip focal lengths.. at least on the x10.. again, wide 28mm using super macro mode, you get awesome bokey with the closeups, but between normal (non-macro mode) mode between 28mm to 50mm, although the aperture is wide open and I set the focus to the right distance, the background isn't all the blurred. once I go up between 85-112mm, the bokeh seems to return and works really well. weird

It's the sensor size I'm sure. I've read that for smaller sized sensor (also usually with slow lenses), it's near impossible to get shallow DOF, but the X10 luckily has a very fast lens.. still, it's a compact camera with much smaller sensor as most compacts have. to get the most shallow DOF & bokeh out of compacts, they say you need to zoom out as far as possible and get focus on subject that way with aperture as wide as possible. that's the only way you can get true "good" bokeh out of the smaller sensors on compact cameras.

It's still a bit confusing that I'm having trouble capturing bokeh at the mid range.. will need to play around more to be sure I'm not trippin', but almost every source I've looked into online point to saying you need to zoom out to max with wideopen to get the good bokeh on these compact cams.

Also, in relation to DOF, focusing on the Super Macro Mode, it still baffles me in super macro mode, the bokeh only shows up when you are really close, within the spec'd super macro range, outside of that and if you try to take pics like normal in that super macro mode, everything is pretty much in focus.. wouldn't you think that if up close and get bokeh & shallow dof, that if you pulled back and took a pic from even further away, wouldn't everything be blurred instead since it's way out of the super macro focal range?

It doesn't make sense to me that you would have more focus further away than you do up close especially when the DOF is so shallow up close already.. everything past even 6"-12" should be out of focus.

If I'm wrong about not being able to get good bokeh between 35-50mm (or even 28-50mm) range and you should be able to get good bokeh throughout the telescoping lens range, the please let me know what I should be trying. Otherwise, I guess I do understand how the X10's ability to get shallow DOF and know what I need to do to get it which is simply to zoom wide open.

Thanks in advance for anybody who can shed some light on this subject.