Try and get very shallow depth of field at portrait differences using a compact camera or very small sensor camera.
Try getting a good wildlife shot of a bird with a camera that can't take a good long lens, or one of a bird in flight that doens't also have fast and capable auto focus.
You can call these niche applications if you like, but if you do, there are more niche applications than non niche.
Of course - if your vision is to take simple social pictures of one or a few people standing relatively still in good lighting - then any old phone will cope.
I posted this photo before when I was asking for directions how to edit it. I used to be a photoreporter and beauty photography wasnt exactly my thing.
But... Bokeh at M43, M.Zuiko 75mm F1.8 lens. Taken outside at 1/2000 at F1.8 with flash in FP mode.
People speak about Fullframe as it is the only system to get this type of bokeh, but its mainly an effect caused by focal lenght and Fnumber of lens.
Case A:
To get exactly same shot of FF as the one above i can:
- take 75mm F1.8 and to shoot it from half distance - its because the viewing angle on FF is wider on the same focal lenght. Bokeh will be the same, but the perspective will be different
- take 150mm f1.8 and shoot it from the same distance. Perspective will be the same, but the bokeh will be different - probably larger and to account for this you can stop down to F3.6 and adjust exposure to 1/1000.
Case B:
When it comes to camera equipment I also have a bit of hoarding problem and good prime lenses with nice bokeh are interesting for me. Last lens I purchased was Sirui 50mm f1.8 Anamorphic.
It has really nice oval shaped bokeh and beautiful lens flare, but...
Its fully manual, with very shallow DOF so you have to utilize viewfinder and every possible focus assist. Even then photos will be slightly blurred. Its very inconvenient to use and the benefit it had to my photography is atm still bit questionable.
There is a plenty of lenses like this with F0,95, usually manual, heavy and large without anythng what would make their use bit more convenient.
I am not disputing whether the lens has or hasn certain bokeh, or way it renders images, what I do question is price and usability of these. And how similar is this to 2000 dollar gold plated USB cable. Both of these products do work, they may even do whats advertised