Beyond the Lens - A Simple Portrait

Written by Tamara Kwan of TammyLynn Photography

Featured on I am Gloucestershire 365's website under FYI Daily Blog on Thursday, 27 January 2011

You don’t need a lot of fancy equipment or a huge studio to make a nice portrait; just some lovely light and a camera. Having a lovely model doesn’t hurt either. The above photo of Lorca was taken in a local coffee shop with just a hand held camera; with very little post processing done on the image; no extra lighting or equipment was used.

The scene for the above photograph....I’m sitting in a local coffee house enjoying a morning coffee with a friend. It was a cloudy overcast morning down in the Stroud Valley and we were sitting by some nice large windows. This combination acts like a huge soft box for diffusing the light, making it nice and soft. There was sufficient light bouncing around the room to add some fill light on the right side of her face.

The only photographic equipment I used was a DSLR, Canon 30D, with a nifty fifty lens. (50mm f/1.8 prime lens) This is a favourite lens among photographers because it’s small, light and cheap but is very clear, sharp and fast. Not fast as in auto focusing, this can be a bit slow at times. When you hear a photographer refer to a lens as fast what they are actually talking about is how large the maximum aperture is. The larger the aperture, the more light that gets through, the faster your shutter speed can be. So having a fast lens means that you can use faster shutter speeds in lower light situations. It also means that you’ll have a much shallower Depth of Field (DOF) when set to the larger apertures which can make for a pleasing out of focus background.

Now that the scene is set, what camera settings did I use? Well it wasn’t particularly bright in the coffee shop, though in the image it looks lovely and bright. How did I achieve this? This is down to my camera settings. With camera in manual mode, ISO set to 800 (for low light), an exposure of 1/200^th of a second (shutter speed) and an f stop of 2.5. F stop refers to how large the aperture is, as discussed above. The smaller the number the larger the opening, the more light gets in, the shallower the DOF. The larger the number the smaller the opening, lesser light gets in, the greater the DOF. I was using the camera’s internal light meter to help me decide which settings to use for this situation. I could have easily used different settings to achieve pretty much the same photograph.

We mustn’t forget about composition, as that can make or break a photograph. As you can see in the above photograph I positioned most of her face in the upper right third of the images. This is within following the photographer’s golden rule of thirds. Putting your subject on the third makes for a much more pleasing image than placing it smack dab in the centre. Well most of the time it does, there are situations where putting your subject in the dead centre just works.

Another little rule for photographs is the left to right rule. As we read from left to right then most compositions work better if they pull your eye from left to right in the photograph. We do this mostly with lead in lines or with light. My portrait above doesn’t exactly follow that rule, as it is much brighter on the left than the right your eye is pulled right to left. If you have a strong image you can sometimes get away with that. In the case above, her eyes are strong enough to hold your attention.

Speaking of eyes, when taking portraits of people or animals the eyes are the most important part of the photograph. The eyes must be sharp, so make sure you focus on those.

So to recap, what’s making the above a nice portrait? The large natural diffused light source, the composition on the thirds, the shallow DOF with nice out of focus background and the eyes nice and sharp and bright. Oh, and a pretty smile. J

Beyond the Lens- Super Mom!

Written by Tamara Kwan of TammyLynn Photography

Featured on I am Gloucestershire 365's website under FYI Daily Blog on Thursday, 16 December 2010

This is one of my favourite photographs that I’ve taken this year, a portrait of my friend Lorca Simons. She’s an actress from Texas who grew up in theatre and, who like me, now calls Gloucestershire home.

My first title for this image was ‘Come Fly with Me’, but I later thought ‘Super Mom’ a better fit, as she is between 7 and 8 months pregnant in the photo.

Technically I’m breaking a composition rule with this image, but I like it anyway. The rule I’m breaking is the  left to right rule. As we read from left to right then images flow better left to right. She’s ‘flying’ from right to left. I could flip the image, and a lot of people do in situations like this, but I don’t like doing that. I think it makes the image look odd. That could be just because I know what it’s supposed to look like though.

I did not have this composition in my head when I took this photo. I saw this image later when the original photograph was coming out of the printer, and I saw it sideways. I thought, wow, it looks like she’s flying! So I did a quick edit to remove the floor, which was mostly black anyway, and rotated the image. I also added a bit more black space on the left and just below to help with the illusion that she was flying and to give her some space to fly into.

Let’s talk about space for a moment. Composition and how much space you have around your subject can greatly effect how the image looks and feels. Sometimes leaving a bit of space can add drama or tension to an image. Sometimes it’s just wasted space and needs to be cropped away. Sometimes cropping in really close and even cropping away some of your subject can add that extra bit of drama to your image. The general rule of thumb is when photographing wildlife or moving objects is to leave a bit of room for them to move into.

Photo Shoot with Lorca Simons

Today I had a fantastic time on a photo shoot with Lorca Simons. She's an actress living here in the Gloucestershire area and she's from Texas! :-D It's nice to have an American friend living near by. Anyway, I went to her house today and took all my studio equipment and we had a photo shoot. We had lots of fun and I think it went pretty well, but of course I thought of lots of ways I wish I'd asked her to pose after I got back home. Oh well, save it for next time. :-) Here are a few of my favourite shots from today of Lorca:

I really enjoyed this photos shoot with Lorca and I hope she will do another one with me again soon. I need more practice talking with and encouraging models in front of my camera. :-)

For the photographers out there this shoot was done with two studio lights, a reflector and natural light through a window. I set one light with a light box in front of her and slightly to my left. The other light, in the back and to my right, I aimed close to the ceiling near the back wall so that the light would bounce onto the back of her head and separate her from the background. I know a snoot would be better but I don't have one and this worked fine I think. There was a large window to my left so I placed a large silver reflector to my right and down low aiming the natural light towards Lorca. The black background is a large piece of black velvet and the white/grayish background is Lorca's bright white walls. I used a light meter to adjust the lighting to around an f stop of around 8. I say around 8 because I changed it a couple of times. With this set up I had to do very little post processing on the photos which saves me loads of time. It's so much better getting it right in the camera. :-)