Portrait Photography Tip Tuesday, vol. 3

Last week we talked about some simple ways to position yourself and your subject relative to the light (the sun for outdoor portraits) to achieve a more even light across the subject’s face.  And if you remember back to the first installment of this tip series, I talked about using lenses with longer focal lengths to produce a more flattering perspective of your child’s face.  The increased focal length has a secondary advantage when it comes to single subjects.  Longer lenses have a much shorter depth-of-field (DOF).  DOF refers to the total amount of the image that is in focus, both in front of, and behind the exact point that the camera lens is focussed on.

Here’s a couple of examples from Halloween.  This first picture was made with a focal length lens of about 110mm, and taken about 8-10 feet away from Jack and ‘Bugga.  It’s not bad, but if you notice, the house and bare trees in the background make for a pretty “busy”  or cluttered looking photograph.

However, by increasing the focal length of our lens to 200mm, and moving a bit closer to Jack,  the combination of a short DOF lens, and placing it very close to the subject results in the background falling completely out of focus.  The upside:  with a little planning, virtually anything can make a usable background.  The downside:  you will end up with a lot of photographs that are nothing more than delete-worthy because getting the right area of the picture in focus is much more difficult (let’s face it, kids move pretty fast and don’t like to sit still very long!) Remember, in photography everything is a matter of trading off one photographic characteristic for another.

Again, by using the same combination of a longer lens and short DOF, you can take a black-top driveway and turn it into a useable background.

This last one is from earlier this year.  For the photographers out there who might be quick to point out that using a wide aperture can give you the same narrow DOF regardless of the distance factors, this picture was made in my basement “studio.”  I didn’t have a lot of time, so instead of setting up a fancy backdrop, I used the unfinished brick wall of the basement.  Same concept:  longer lens, shorter camera to subject distance, further subject to background distance.  (shot at F9.0 for you techie-minded folk out there)

If you’re interested in learning more about how to use your digital SLR to take better portraits and photographs of your children and family, send an email to Jay@jacphoto.net for information on Jay’s upcoming Photography Basics Workshops!