Sasha wide open

My friends and I often debate which lenses have the best "Bokeh", or out of focus pleasing characteristics. I like the lens I used here, the 50 mm Leica Summicron, shooting it wide open. Leica lenses are designed to be shot wide open, and most street shooters will shoot with the aperture wide open, or with the widest f-stop setting. This gives pleasing out of focus areas in front or behind the subject in focus. Some lenses give more pleasing Bokeh than others. Its just a characteristic of the design and the glass in the lens. Here you can see that the foreground and background are out of focus. The area in focus is a very narrow region, and depending on the f-stop, can be very narrow, such that only the eyes, for instance, may be in focus, while the tip of the nose and the back of the ears may be out of focus. In this image, the region in focus is not quite this narrow.