Find a location with good light for a portrait shot. Place your subject some distance in front of a simple background and select a wide aperture together with a moderately long focal length such as 100mm on a 35mm full-frame camera (about 65mm on a cropped-frame camera). Take a viewpoint about one and a half metres from your subject, allowing you to compose a headshot comfortably within the frame. Focus on the eyes and take the shot.
Wide apertures create shallow depth of field, especially when combined with a long focal length and a close viewpoint. In human vision the eye registers out-of-focus areas as vague or indistinct – we can’t look directly at the blur. But in a photograph, areas of soft focus can form a large part of the image surface so they need to be handled with just as much care as the main subject.
Don’t forget that the camera’s viewfinder image is obtained at maximum aperture for maximum brightness and therefore at the shallowest depth of field. Use the depth of field preview button to see the actual depth of field at any particular aperture. It’s surprising to see the effect that a single f stop can have on the appearance of an image.
First I wanted to understand better the termonitogy so I took another course on Skillshare DSLR Photography II: Understanding Lenses, Focal Length & Shooting by Photo Essentials x Justin Bridges
I'm attaching a few screenshots I took from the course, as I was mainly confused when saying long or short focal length (as it kind of means the opposite of what my common sense understands).
As my camera is mirrorless (Cannon M5) my camera is not full frame, it is APS-C, also my widest lens is 15-45 so I had to just go with what I have which is 45mm on my APS-C which is something like 67.5 on a full frame (multiplies by 1.5).
Lighting was a bit challenging as we are in winter and it's mainly overcast, but I found a nice window of light in the afternoon when my friend also could help me out to take some photos of her.
I used my widest aperture which is 6.3 on a 45mm zoom, and shot on 100 ISO.
I really liked how the forest behind my subject was blurred in a beautiful soft way giving a nice view into the portrait.
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