The focal length of your lens will determine how far you have to stand away from your subject to get the image your after. A technique I use is to stand at a comfortable distance away from my subject and so they do not feel like you are `too close`. I put a 50mm lens on my Canon 35mm Camera and look through the view finder. I like to be able to see a three quarter length image of the subject with head and shoulders and waist line in the image. I now know if I put a 100mm lens on I can get head and shoulder shots from this distance.
My favourite lens to use for portraits is the Canon 85mm 1.8 set wide open or a 150mm 3.5 lens on my Pentax 645. If you need three quarter length shots you can stand back a bit further. Distortion of your subject will take place if you get to close with shorter focal length lenses. If in doubt stand back...
The longer the focal length the further back you will need to stand and the less eye contact you will have with your subject. If you use 200mm lenses for portraits you may find that when you ask your subject to look towards the camera they can not look straight down the lens for visual impact. With shorter focal length lenses 85mm-100mm you can get high impact eye contact images through the lens.
To make the back ground go out of focus behind the subject focus on their eyes and use an aperture of f1.4 - f4 depending on the lens you use. The longer the focal length the smaller the aperture you may use to keep their face sharp. This will take some experimentation but i use 85mm at f1.8 and throw backgrounds out of focus with eyes and face in focus.
The set up I use for portraits and weddings.
Canon eos 55 - 50mm lens
Canon eos 50E - 75-300mm
- Full Length Shots - 50mm
- Three Quarter - 85mm
- Head and shoulders - 75-300
Richard Barley
www.pureprints.co.uk
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