Purple Pine Cone DOF question

[dmartinc]

Canon D5 Mark II

Aperture: 15

Speed 1/15 (with tripod)

Focal length 66
This was from a rare dwarf conifer at the Bronx Botanical Gardens.
DOF on this could better, but smaller aperture would have increased exposure time and decreased the image quality, I think. Any thoughts would be appreciated.

[kstiltne]

It looks to me like you had plenty of DOF to work with. I definitely would've opened up the aperture to bring the focus in on the pine cone and shorten the exposure time...and I don't know much about Canon's, but I'm pretty sure you can safely work with higher ISO's with that camera to shorten the exposure time a bit more...that said, it doesn't seem like you had too much trouble with camera shake, though 1/15 is usually a bit slow to try to go handheld.

[RonCar10]

You could have opened the aperture which would have decreased the DOF and created a better bokeh, eliminating some of the background distraction. Decreasing the aperture does not equate to a decrease in imge quality. Most lenses have a sweet spot in the middle apertures, but quality lenses will result in high quality images throughout the aperture range.