Provo Portraits

ISO: 100  Focal Length: 50mm 

Aperture: f/4  Shutter Speed: 1/200

Flash at 1/4 Power

Last week I was shooting some for my good friends. They were looking for some shots for a Christmas card. We headed to downtown Provo for the shoot. There are some great older buildings to use as a backdrop for portraits. For this shot I used a flash that fired off camera to the right. The flash fired through a translucent umbrella to spread it out more so the light would be very soft.

Here is a diagram of how it was set up:

Lighting Diagram from www.lightingdiagrams.com

Light is the key to photography. Using the off camera flash with an umbrella makes the light directional but there aren't harsh shadows because the light is diffused. With my flash off camera I can only shoot at a 1/200s shutter speed so I adjusted my aperture accordingly and fired a few test shots to make sure everything was dialed in. 

For post processing I sharpened the raw file, and adjusted the shadows and highlights just a little bit to get the exposure just how I wanted it. The final step was removing almost all of the saturation, I decided not to do a full black and white process. I kept just a little bit of the color because in this case I thought it was more interesting than straight black and white.

If you want to learn how to shoot with an off camera flash I will cover how to do that in an upcoming post.

Coastal Portrait

ISO: 100  Focal Length: 18mm 

Aperture: f/4.5  Shutter Speed: 1/30

This is actually a portrait of my wife and I from the day we got engaged at Solana Beach in Southern California. The sun was about to set so there was very nice directional light with a golden tint. I set the tripod up next to the cliff, dialed in the settings I wanted and put a 10 second timer on. The leading lines are what make this image.

The cliff has these great lines that not only create depth in the image but they also guide the eye right to the subject.

For post processing I used Nik Silver Efex Pro 2 for the black and white conversion and that was pretty much it. I just picked the preset I liked the best for the image, adjusted a few sliders to fine tune things and the image was good to go. 

Now I probably should've used a little wider aperture (smaller number) so the depth of field was a little shallower and the rocks would have been a little more blurred. I think the image would have been a little stronger if I had done that.

Bonneville Salt Flats Portrait

ISO: 100  Focal Length: 50mm 

Aperture: f/2.8  Shutter Speed: 1/4000

This was a shot from an engagement session I did. The couple wanted to do it out on the Bonneville Salt Flats. It is a pretty cool place to go shoot. This was shot in the afternoon and the light was still pretty harsh. I would have liked to have shot it early or late to get better light from the sun, but unfortunately that just wasn't an option. When shooting at the Salt Flats you will want to overexpose just a bit maybe +.5 or +1 ev, otherwise the salt flats will be a sort of gray color instead of white. For a lot of shots during this session we used a 5 in 1 reflector. In this case we positioned the translucent part of the reflector to the left of the camera to take out the harsh shadows and give some directional light to the couple. I used an aperture of f/2.8 to get a shallow depth of field to isolate the couple from the background. If I had tried a wider aperture the shutter would not be able to fire fast enough so f/2.8 was the widest aperture possible. For a wider aperture you would need to use a neutral density filter (think of sunglasses for your camera) it restricts the amount of light going through the lens without changing the color of the image.

During the entire shoot I was shooting with my 50mm lens that I mentioned in my last post. It is really great for portraits.

For post processing I used Nik Silver Efex Pro 2. It is an incredible tool for converting images to black and white. 

If you shoot a lot of portraits I would really recommend getting a 5 in 1 reflector. They are a fantastic tool that can be had very cheap. Like my 43" set cost less than $20. I use the Neewer Reflector and it has really worked great for me. It does have a few drawbacks but for less than $20 it is well worth it.