Both of today’s images were taken with the same lens, the Olympus 75/1.8, a lens able to achieve shallow DOF as well as the compression of a lens equivalent to 150 mm.
The Image of the Day may not look like it, but I used f10 for maximum sharpness of the foreground blossoms. The background is still pleasantly out of focus, because I was close to my subject and the distance between subject and background was comparably huge.
The other image was taken at f1.8, but focused somewhere in midground, with the whole subject pretty far away for slightly different values of “far”. The result looks much more like a continuum.