Apparently, small sensors can’t do bokeh. It’s funny how often the “rules” of photography turn out to be old wives’ tales.

Of course there are cameras that don’t do bokeh. In the early 2000s, I grew inexplicably fond of Kodak Advantix cameras. Bizarre, I know, but they were lightweight, easily loaded with 35mm film, and they produced “panoramic” images with ease. The cheap cameras I used were also, invariably, fixed-focus; and if there’s one thing that fixed-focus compacts are really, really good at, it’s ensuring that everything is in focus.

But almost any other camera? Hell, I still aim for bokeh when I’m shooting fisheye.

2014 was a transition year for me. Disillusioned by Olympus turning its back on digital SLRs, I bought a Panasonic Lumix FZ150 and started to explore what it could do. And the answer was – a lot. The small sensor limited things, of course. Low-light could be challenging, and shots at the long end of the zoom invariably lacked crispness. But the colours were strong, especially in vivid mode, and I could get punchy results with minimal effort.

With only a 1/2.3″ sensor, you might expect that it struggled with bokeh. Oh, no. With the right subject, it was a bokeh beast. One of the many reasons I loved that camera.