This is f5.6 at an effective focal length of 300 mm, focused on the two people walking towards “Villach’s probably most beautiful terrace along river Drau” (love those overly specific claims!). As you see, there’s plenty of DOF, but I don’t mind.
Much to the contrany in fact. Normally my problem with long lenses is, that I can’t use them to capture what I see. Depth of field is a simple physical characteristic of a lens, but it gets much mor ecomplicated when it comes to the human eye and to the brain doing the final processing.
We are vigilant creatures by nature. Our eyes constantly scan the environment, flicking across the scene, always re-focusing. In the brain these raw signals are merged together. Much detail is immediately dropped, different depth layers are mentally joined into one image, and sometimes this process of merging even goes along the time axis.
Therefore, if I want to isolate a certain depth layer, I can easily do it with a long lens completely opened up. In many ways that is satisfying, not because it perfectly records what we see, it’s because our eyes never see that way. It’s the exotic that we love in shallow DOF images.
If I strive for more compositional photography by cutting a frame from reality, then shallow DOF gets in my way.