Depth of Field Control

Don't get me wrong, I love my modern digital camera. But I miss something that the manual, manual cameras of 50 years ago had, and that was easily accessible and understandable depth of field control. 

The image above is a scan from a slide, I took sometime in the 1970's, probably on a 50mm f1.4 or f1.8, wide open, with only the center of the flower in focus.  This was easy to do, it was something you had to understand.  Depth of field was important if you wanted the background in focus, you had to lower the shutter speed, close the lens down. But in learning that you also learned to isolate the subject, by opening up the lens and increasing the shutter speed.  ASA or ISO was fixed, it was what you loaded in the camera (in black and white you could push it a stop or two, but if you did that you had to do it for the entire roll and compensate in processing). 

My digital will allow me to shoot in aperture priority mode, but it is not as easy as when you were setting the aperture manually.  I have one super fast lens, f1.8.  I should put it on and go practice this art.