One of the tools of composition you often need to consider is the angle between your camera and your subject. You can shoot from high above your subject, from down below or anywhere in between.

Now there are many reasons why you would try a particular angle, depending of course on your subject and environment. For these shots I was using a wider lens than you’d typically use for portraits. Somewhere around 30mm on a crop sensor body (45mm equivalent in 35mm/full frame terms).

The important thing here is that I tried to make sure I was at the same level as the boys or slightly above. This camera angle if often used when photographing children as you get the perspective of being down on their level which makes sense and is more natural for the viewer.

If I’d shot this from a higher camera angle it would have completely changed the feel of the images, not necessarily bad or good…just different.

It’s a great idea to learn to recognise these compositional tools so you can add them to your repertoire.

The room we were in was a little tricky, it’s a small, square, white walled bedroom which funnily enough is completely empty which certainly came in handy! But because it was so small there was VERY little room to move let alone setup gear. This made things difficult as there really wasn’t an angle from my camera where I didn’t have the legs of a lightstand (or this legs of a 2nd boy) in my shot. That’s one of the benefits of high key though, it’s simple to fix later in post production. This is of course never the approach you want to take but you have to work with what you’ve got right?

I didn’t use any light modifiers this time, just 3 bare speedlights. The setup was simple, I setup 2 SB80-DXs on lightstands in each front corner of the room, about 1-2 meters away from the front wall. Both flashes were zoomed out to 24mm, both pointing towards the center of the front wall and both had a gobo attached to help minimise spill into the room. These lights ensured that the background went pure white. The room however, was far too small to prevent some of the light hitting the subject(s) in the room so instead I used that to my advantage to give a nice rim light on the boys.

Finally I placed my 3rd flash in the back of the room on a lightstand pointing upwards to where the ceiling meets the wall. This effectively made the entire room one giant softbox!

The tricky part was keeping the boys at least a metre or so away from the front wall, if they ventured into that area they would be hit by direct flash which is not very pretty.

Here are some results:

You can see here that Kira was a little close to the background, there is direct flash on the right side of his face and a nasty hard shadow caused by his arm.

All in all considering I spent around 15 minutes setting up and shooting, I’m quite happy with the results. Shooting kids is always tricky at the best of times and the layout of the room certainly didn’t help, but hopefully you can see that good results aren’t that hard to find with only minimal gear.

There are a few reasons why this is such a popular lens, some of which are the fact that it’s nice and small, super cheap and usually opens up to f/1.4 or f/1.8 which lets in a tonne of light and allows for an extremely shallow depth of field. The Canon system even has a crazy (and inversely crazy expensive!) f/1.2, insane!!

Most people tout about how great this is in low light. And that’s true, it is. But…you can’t simply take as gospel “oh no problem, I’ll just open up to f/1.4 and everything will just work out great!“. Nope, you need to learn to recognize the characteristics of this lens and how to control it and know when NOT to open up as wide as you can.

These two images were taken at f/1.4 and f/1.8 respectively. In the first you can clearly see how Noah’s right eye is completely out of focus. This was intentional, I wanted the left eye sharp with everything else out of focus. I knew that the 50mm at that range (only a couple of feet) at f/1.4 would give me extremely shallow depth of field, so I used that characteristic to my advantage.

This image (f/1.8) is similar. Chelsea’s facing the camera directly so both eyes are lined up to the camera on the same focus plane. This means the end result is that both eyes are sharp, and everything else is out of focus! Again this was intentional. If she had turned her face even a little we would have seen a result like the image above.

Now back to the point I was trying to make, which was really to understand how your lens works at all aperture settings (taking into consideration the distance to your subject).

Imagine you had a group of people, even two people only, and you want to shoot a nice tight portrait of them both. The environment is relatively low light, what do you do? If you answered “open up to 1.4 and fire away” then you’d be incorrect

Remember the examples above? If you shot a medium close up (head and shoulders) of more than one person at f/1.4 on a 50mm lens you’d likely get bad results. Why? Because the depth of field at this setting/distance is just far too shallow. At f/1.4 from around 5-6 feet away (on a crop sensor body) you’ll get around 7cm that is in focus. This is the combination in front of and behind what you’re actually focus on. Think about it. That is extremely hard to control, and literally impossible to pull off a good image of more than one person at that range.

At f/2.8 this depth of field range increases to around 14cm, still cutting it very close.

f/4 is up around 20cm which is still very tight, but manageable. You need to make sure your subjects are all lined up on the same plane of focus otherwise some of them will be out of focus.

So this is the point, shooting blindly at f/1.4 isn’t always going to give you good results even if that’s what everyone says to do in low light. Instead, try bumping up your ISO and/or slowing down your shutter speed.

Learn the characteristics of all your lenses and how they interact with your camera and importantly…how they work at any given aperture/distance from subject combination!

Happy shooting

Now it didn’t quite help that the night I decided to do this I was in the middle of a string of no sleep nights and getting over being sick. Figures  But I’m usually time poor so I didn’t let all that stop me from trying to get something hopefully useful.

Here’s my pick from the session:

I used 4 light sources for this, the goal was that they be subtle enough to not pull too much attention to “the lighting”, yet once you know where they are you’d miss them if they were gone.

A brief technical rundown:

• SB-80DX 1/2 power camera left into 28″ softbox
• SB-80DX 1/64th + 2/3 power zoomed on background
• SB-80DX 1/64th power zoomed for hairlight camera right
• Silver reflector camera right

Here is a diagram explaining the lighting:

Anyone else have a recent self portrait to share?

The results are ok but still, don’t forget to check your settings!

You might have different things you look for when shooting different subjects, landscapes for example may be stronger if you use a foreground, middle ground and the majesty of the background (which is probably your “subject”).

Portraits might be different though, typically you don’t want anything leading the viewers eye away from the subject unless perhaps if it’s an environmental portrait.

Most of the time you want to look for simple contrasting, backgrounds to place your subjects in front of. That way the person really pops off the image, giving the viewer only one thing to look at.

Here’s an example of using a simple background. Josh was sitting on a bench with about 100 people all around him. I took a higher vantage point so the background would actually be the ground behind Josh which was nice and clean. All I had to do was wait until the coast was clear (nobody walking past) and shoot. Using f/2 on a 50mm lens gave a nice shallow depth of field. Note that I purposely angled the shot to get a person legs in the background to appear above Josh’s head. This helped make his black hair stand out against the dark background.

Next time you’re out shooting, consider the background (and the foreground and middle ground if relevant) to get stronger images.

Sometimes in the course of a shoot you’ll need to adjust your settings to accommodate the surroundings you’re shooting in. It could be bumping up your ISO, switching to Shutter Priority, setting your White Balance etc. The point is that you should have a baseline to work from, a “default” set of camera settings so you know you’re in the ballpark when you start shooting.

To me, ISO is the main culprit and as much as I remember to check my settings all the time, I got caught out the other day. In the morning I was shooting in a very shady area so I had bumped up my ISO to 1000. All good except when I went out for a walk later that day I took my camera. I spotted some flowers to snap and it wasn’t until I got home that I realised that I had shot the entire sequence still at ISO 1000!

In this scenario it wasn’t a deal breaker as I wasn’t working with a paying client. Still, the images suffered from using a high ISO and it’s another time to learn the lesson the hard way.

Things to check:

• ISO
• Shooting mode (for me it’s always “M” for Manual)
• Shutter speed
• Aperture
• White Balance
• Battery charge amout
• Status of memory card

My “baseline” is typically:

• ISO 200 (Nikon’s default)
• Auto white balance
• Manual mode
• f/2.8
• 1/100th

Here are some shots from my walk, you can see they would have been much better if it wasn’t for noise inducing 1000 ISO

Lot’s of baseball and softball happens here, luckily it was empty the day we took the boys down. They loved it! I wonder if they’ll end up playing there in a few years?

Here are a couple of images from the session. Lighting was simple; a Westcott 28″ softbox from camera left and a 50mm f/1.4 lens. Easy!

Luckily they have a backyard which the boys loved! There was a little bit of rain so we had to stay under the HUGE tree they have.

Of course I took my camera, here are some pics