Getting things out of focus takes work.

Of course I'm not talking about my usual out-of-focus pictures, the ones I delete immediately and never tell a soul about. No, I'm talking about the intentional things we photographers do to limit the depth of field in our pictures. Things we can do to make the backgrounds nice and soft, leaving just the subject in focus and standing out dramatically from its surroundings.

I still remember the time, some 50 years ago, when I first realized how cameras could be set to produce this effect, marveling at the sorts of images I saw W. Eugene Smith producing for Life magazine. Or the sorts of stark images David Douglas Duncan could evoke from the battlefields