Klaus, can you please explain to me why #1 has clearly defined circular highlight rendition, despite being well beyond the plane of focus, this troubles me, visually and because I don't understand it. The remaining images have much more natural and pleasingly smooth transition of tones even with moderately colour and saturation contrasty edges despite the background being closer to the plane of focus. Although I do notice some other higher luminance contrast out of focus edges seem more clearly defined than I might have expected.
The effect in last three images are just what I am hoping for, sharp clear contrasty subject and the rest a nice, smoothly diminishing background with no visually distracting areas.
It's as though the greater the edge contrast, the greater the acuity, irrespective of distance from the plane of focus. In #2, just above the central top red leaf are some fonds or bunch of small branches, they seem to be much sharper than might be expected, given their neighbours are nicely blurred. I guess they could receive attention in Photoshop, but...
Where the luminance edge contrast is low, the bokeh is lovely, when the luminance edge contrast is high the bokeh isn't as nice.
Does this edge sharpness and the sharp circular highlights of out of focus objects vary with lens type? The circular highlights seem reminiscent of the circular doughnuts of OOF background highlights from reflex telephoto lenses.
I guess with careful choice of camera angle and subject this may be able to be overcome. However, sometimes that isn't possible in the field, finding the subject in nice condition and accessible is often challenge enough, getting a good angle can be impossible.
