kymarto Loc: Portland OR and Milan Italy

If you are talking about me thanks for the kind words. My only real dog in the fight is accurate information, which I try to provide, and keep my own large ego out of the mix when I can.

I've had the good fortune of being able to earn a living with photography--actually videography, but anyway--and having to do it every day burns a lot of the pretension out of one.

As to portraits--everyone has their own style. I remember years ago seeing an article about someone who did street portraits with an 11x14 Deardorff view camera. Quite amazing, not only for the sharpness, but for the extremely shallow depth of field, of which I personally am a big fan. Karsch had a thing with lighting, which I now know was done with a combination of soft and extremely hard light sources.

As to diffraction limiting, here is a very good article--worth the read. You'll see that it depends practically on f stop and sensor size. At f20 on a crop sensor, there would be visible degradation of the fine details of an image, but on the other hand we are talking FINE details, which would probably not be noticeable except by direct comparison at a high magnification. By the way, he's shooting at the FF equivalent of 36mm, which is very wide for a portrait, but I'm guessing that he might need to be that close to get the background effect he is looking for.

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/diffraction-photography.htm

This is less technical and with real-world examples:

http://www.bobatkins.com/photography/technical/diffraction.html

RRS Loc: Not sure

Yes most definitely. Your one in the group of contributors that I feel adds a lot to this forum. Your real life work gives you an inside edge. There are a lot of people on this form that have valuable information that they thankfully share.

dandi Loc: near Seattle, WA

This was my first reaction: f/20-what about diffraction? I read the article by cambridgeincolour, it's very good.

Read this article: https://dtmateojr.wordpress.com/2014/10/09/understanding-the-effects-of-diffraction/
He makes strong statements-like "a full frame camera shot at f/16 will not resolve any detail higher than 8Mp."

This is another good one about Resolution and sharpness
https://dtmateojr.wordpress.com/2013/12/11/resolution-and-sharpness/

Let us know what you think, thanks.

kymarto Loc: Portland OR and Milan Italy

Those are both good articles.