Exercise 2.4
Find a location with good light for a portrait shot. Place your subject some distance in front of a simple background and select a wide aperture together with a moderately long focal length such as 100mm on a 35mm full-frame camera (about 65mm on a cropped-frame camera). Take a viewpoint about one and a half metres from your subject, allowing you to compose a headshot comfortably within the frame. Focus on the eyes and take the shot.

Longer focal lengths appear to compress space, giving a shallower depth of acceptable sharpness, which is known as depth of field. This makes a short or medium telephoto lens perfect for portraiture: the slight compression of the features appears attractive while the shallow depth of field adds intensity to the eyes and ‘lifts’ the subject from the background.

Stanley, December 2017

Riley, December 2017

This gorgeous pair both wanted to pose for this exercise, so obviously I had to photograph them both.

Aperture Priority: f/2.8, 70 mm, 1/250 sec, ISO1000

Particularly in the image of Riley, you can see the very shallow plane where sharpness is in the three fence strips level with him. The wall in the distance is just a colour and shape. In both images, the subjects standout from the background.

I absolutely love the image of Riley when edited in black and white. I also added a colour look up filmstock layer to give it timeless film quality.   There seems to be a real connection with him, which I think is more pronounced in the black and white version and I like the fact he’s not smiling.

Riley