My wife, Ruth, is a very capable pianist (though she would never admit it).

I wanted to take a photo of her hands flying across the keys, while reflected in the shiny black back behind the keyboard. Light was only natural light from a window, behind and left of the camera.  Because of the relatively low light levels, I used my 50mm manual focus lens, as it is quite fast (has a low aperture - f/1.8).

My original vision was to have the hands stopped by the shutter so as to be clear. The first photo achieves this result, taken at 1/60 sec, just fast enough to make the hands sharp, and with shallow depth of field (DOF) of f/2. However, to really stop the movement, and make everything sharp, a bit faster shutter, such as 1/125, would be needed (you can see a tiny bit of motion in the little finger of her right hand).

As an experiment, I tried a larger DOF, at f/3.5, which slowed the shutter to 1/13 sec, allowing the movement of the hands to blur a bit, as the second photo shows.

Both images are shot at ISO 100, using manual focus.

I posted the second image on Google+ and it seemed to receive a lot of positive response.

Which do you like better? Why?