@maggiemae I used my nifty 50 f1.4, but had it set at 2.5 since it was so bright out -- and it still required a 1/1250 shutter speed! I wanted the DoF to be pretty shallow since the background was not particularly appealing.
@rvwalker I needed to blur out the background -- it's just a messy part of campus at the moment. But it didn't look right to have the focus at the start of the chain so I moved it back a bit.