Portraiture

Ms Emma Tooth - Fine Artist



Ms Olivia

Several weeks ago I visited the Kensal Green Cemetery on its open day. It was a great day out, and I happened to meet these two fair ladies that were willing to pose for the camera :) I'd used the 55mm 2.8 AIS Micro nikkor - basically my only choice as my 70-200 was in the shop. And that, it did not disappoint. Now usually when I'm out shooting wildlife, I'm always fighting shutter speed - I need speed to stop motion. That kinda carried on here, and as I was very nervous, I just adjusted my aperture to a somewhat low setting of F4 - hoping that that would sharpen the lens a tiny bit - and max out my shutter speed for whatever exposure that was. In retrospect, it would have been better to just stop down to F8, as I probably have the shutter speed to get more of the subject in focus - critical focus was of course on the eyes. At F4 though, most of the image was defocused. It's unlikely that you will see this in a web sized image, only the full res image will highlight this fact. I'll just have to do a test print to see if this works :)

The lighting that day was pretty diffuse, but as always my SB600 is always engaged. I'd set it off-shoe to camera left on both photos, and it provided the critical highlights to the eyes, as well as to give the colours some pop. Flash rules!