Portrait Lenses

Since as a photographer portraits will probably be your bread and butter, this is a question that is asked a lot by photography students, “What lens or lenses are best for portraits?”

As a general rule, we recall people’s feature best from what’s called the 15 feet rule. In the case of facial recognition, when we see a familiar face, our brain is triggered to reconstruct an image of that face and those features as they appear from 15 feet away according to researchers, so,in order to achieve realistic proportions, we need to shoot from around 15 feet from the subject.

Outdoor portrait shot from around 6 feet with my EF 85mm F/1.8

So, what is the optimum portrait lens? Well it depends on how much of a person you are shooting and show much you want showing. If you want the whole person standing, then you would use a 50-70mm lens, if they sit down then a 50-105mm would work great. If you want a tight head and shoulders shot, then you’d want at least a 200-300mm lens since you want to still be around 15 feet away. Ever see a professional model shoot on location? The photographer is usually using a fat lens on a monopod like a 300mm F/2.8 or even a 400mm F/2.8.

Now I am not advocating that the 15 feet rule is set in stone, different photographers will shoot from different distances to get the look they want. I will sometime used a 50mm and get closer to the subject, with the 50mm, the distance is around 5 feet with a full frame body like I use and I also love, as many photographers do, to shoot portraits with my 85mm portrait lens and when using that lens I can stand at around 9 feet from the subject and fill the frame nicely.

Environmental portrait of WWII actor shot from around 15 feet with 70-200mm lens at 200mm

Many photographers these days will just use their 70-200mm F/2.8 for all their portrait work, which is why this particular lens is the most popular and the lens that sells the most by any builder. One thing you do want to remember when shooting portraits is to be mindful of the distance you shoot from as when you get closer you can make the subject’s nose bigger and their ears smaller. Shoot from too far away and you make their face flat.

Also remember your depth of field as generally the idea is portraits is to make the background disappear, you want the background to be blurry and out of focus as your subject is the important part of the image in an portrait.



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What is Composition?

Composition is the arrangement of elements within a frame, which gives you the most powerful ability to attract the eye and hold it as long as possible. Edward Weston said it best, “Composition is the strongest way of seeing something.”

Basically, composition is all about keeping things simple and excluding what isn’t necessary to make your image appealing to the eye. You want to keep balancing what you get within your frame, when you strive for simpler and simpler, it makes your images stronger and stronger.

The last thing you want is a lot of random “junk” in your images, it makes them more distracting than appealing. Every time you raise your camera to make an image you should be creating your most basic and clean composition possible. Make your you don’t accidentally pick up items in the background or even the foreground. Branches, people, vehicles anything random like that will ruin your images and take away from the subject and story you are trying to say with your work.

If you practice simplicity and exclusion you will get to the point where it will become second nature for you as you shoot. Composition is all about getting the basic, underlying structure of an image to appeal on the most elemental portion of our subconscious mind. Doing this is what generates the “Wow” factor and catches the viewer’s attention. Take the image below, I shot this interior view for the leading lines going to the back of the room. The image is simple but give your eye a sense of depth and I made it black & white as I feel it makes the composition stronger.

Interior of an abandoned building

Composition is the organization of the elements within the frame and leads to the strongest cleanest image possible. Composition is not to be confused with framing, framing is what you do by zooming in and out or moving the camera up and down as you look through your viewfinder. Many photographers don’t realize this, but framing cannot do anything to change the relationship between objects in an image. The framing part is easy and you can usually frame an image after it’s shot by cropping.

The only way to change and optimize the arrangement of the elements in your image is to change your point-of-view and moving your camera to different locations. If you want to find the best composition then you need to move around, change your position, not merely the direction in which you point your camera. Never, ever confuse composition with framing, which is simply zooming in and our or pointing the camera or both.

Think of composition as when your girlfriend comes over and straightens all your magazines, cameras, dirty clothes and other stuff you left laying around the house. To you the mess made sense and you think the same thing about your compositions, which is why men tend to have the toughest time with composition. Most people set up for a shot in the most convenient spot and shoot away, zooming in and out and looking left and right, but that’s it. They figure they can fix it later in Photoshop or Lightroom, just like they’ll clean the house next week. Yes you can clean up your house next week, but once the shutter is closed, you cannot fix composition later. The only way to make a strong composition is to look through your viewfinder and make it as strong as possible before you ever press the shutter.

If you can, move the objects around or have your model move and re-position themselves to make the image as strong and appealing to the eye as possible. Keep your composition in mind at all times and you will make your best work! Now get out there and work on that composition.


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Composition

For this week’s blog post I want to talk about composition in your photography. Good composition is making sure you have a strong image without a lot of clutter or unnecessary items in it that detract from the eye of the viewer.

Good composition means your images only contain the “meat and potatoes” as it were to make for an image that the viewer looks at and says “WOW!” When I look through my viewfinder, I am trying to de-focus my eye and attention and concentrate on only what I feel will make the image strong and then move my framing to fit that scenario.

When out shooting, especially landscapes you want to simplify your image and exclude any extraneous items that are not going to add to the image’s overall composition. Many times this will mean moving around both physically and with your camera to change the view and get the exact “picture” that others will look at and their eyes will stay engaged in that final image as long as possible.

                                          Broken Fence - Canon T3i 18-55mm IS kit lens

Many new shooters think that you cannot accomplish all of this with the crop sensor camera you buy through the school. This is not true, as although I prefer my full frame cameras for shooting landscapes, you can still get fantastic landscapes with a crop sensor body. Many of the crop bodies have fantastic wide angle lenses for shooting scenes with strong composition.

Many of the manufacturers have very good to high quality lenses for shooting landscapes even on a crop sensor body. Canon, for example has a really nice EF-S 10-20mm lens that makes fantastic wide landscapes!

I know that sometimes, when shooting there are other objects that detract from an image that you really want, for example a really beautiful church steeple with a fantastic, colorful sky behind it at sunrise or sunset but there are power lines in the field of view and they sit right where it is hard to get around them. You can try moving to a different position, but maybe you cannot get that same sky from a different angle or side of the building, this is when you have to get creative. Try a longer focal length lens to get a tighter framing for the shot. It might not be the larger view that you originally wanted but at least you got the important part without the detracting power lines.

Considering limiting your objects in your view when shooting for your next assignment or shooting for yourself. You will find that your images will be stronger and you should get a better critique from that professor. Throw that final image on a site such as Student Stock or 500px and let other photographers view and rate it to see how you did, you may be amazed with the results.

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Hip to be Square

When you're planning a capture, it's vital to keep in mind what your final use of the image will be. Setting the correct aspect ratio will help you avoid cropping out essential portions of an image when you and your clients print them out, and changing up your aspect ratio can help challenge you as a photographer to come up with new compositions and keep you on your toes creatively!

Platforms like Instagram have helped change the way we look at and think about the dimensions of images. While the square composition is by no means a new idea, modern cameras are usually set to the 2:3 ratio (resulting, for example, in a 4x6" image). Framing images with a square result in mind (by adjusting your DSLR settings, shifting your camera phone to square mode, or simply planning to crop in post-production) can refresh your eye. For some examples of DSLR 1:1 aspect ratio images, see a few of the images in my Tanzania gallery. My camera settings stayed in the 2:3 aspect ratio for the trip, but a few scenes just screamed square!

Are you a fan of the square image? How about panoramas? Maybe you stick with the classic 8x10"? Leave a comment with a link to your favorite image that strays from the 2:3 ratio!

The images in this post are from my Instagram account.

-Friday Ambassador