Slug

After a fun Saturday being out and about I spent all Sunday being lazy as a slug, lol:)

Hi Lisa,

While technically shooting this 50mm F/1.4 lens does provide very good to excellent levels of clarity , there are limitations as to when this lens should be used at F/1.4.

You are at close range on a subject that that has depth.

The lens is not a macro design, so that its focal plane is not best corrected at this range, and certainly not at F/1.4. The use of F/1.4 at close focus allows for very little DOF.

Now, I , too,  shoot wide open with macros, allowing only the subject of interest to be on focus. You might have picked the background shell as your subject of interest, allowing the fairground shell to blur. That is fine. However, the lens definition is not good at this range and plane of focus used, so F/2.8 , F/4 or F/5.6 would have provided better lens characteristics to form a better image.

Now, if you still required the front of the shell to be blurred, then using the manual focus, you could still obtain that effect by focusing further behind where the focus lies now.

Last point, if you did want more DOF, moving back a bit from the scene works well, too.

Best regards,  Mike