Hi, I'm Mike Grave from Creative Photography and today I'm going to talk to you about portrait
photography. A lot of people say when they come on our courses that it's all well and
good having thousands of pounds with a gear, but what if we haven't got a lot of expensive
equipment? Can we still take good photographs? So today what we're going to do is we're going
to go out and about with just some standard gear and we're going to see if we can take
some really cracking pictures with just one camera and one lens. Now normally I'll use
a camera like this in my professional day job. This is a D800 with a 72-200 lens which
is about, probably about three and a half, four thousand pounds. But today all I'm going
to use is this. I'm going to use a Nikon D5100 with an 85mm lens. Now this is perfect for
portrait photography as we're going to see. Now I shoot all the time in manual mode. If
you're unfamiliar with manual mode, the best setting to go for for today would be to A,
which is aperture value. Now aperture is the hole in the middle of the lens. Let me show
you with this lens here. Can you see the aperture opening and closing? You can also see it on
the back of some cameras. This one here you can see as you go down to F2.8, F2, F1.8,
see the circle getting wider there? That shows you the aperture is opening, which is what
we want. Now also with aperture value, the failsafe mode is going to ISO sensitivity
settings and use auto ISO. Here it's on. And also important set the minimum shutter speed.
Now the minimum shutter speed ideally should be around a hundredth of a second. That will
ensure you get sharp shots all the time. And those settings should allow us to get some
cracking photos without too much messing around. Now the aperture is the hole through the middle
of the lens as we saw earlier. And the bigger the hole through the middle of the lens, the
more it affects the depth of field. I'm going to show you how it affects it by taking few
shots of Courtney at different apertures, starting at F1.8 and going all the way up
to F11. We're going to see how that makes the depth of field larger. The higher up we
go the aperture range. An easy way to demonstrate how lenses work is if you grab a pen, put
it close to your eyes and focus on the pen and you'll see the pens in focus. And with
your peripheral vision you'll see the backgrounds quite out of focus. Now then if you move the
pen further away from your face you'll see the pen is still in focus but the background
will be more in focus. That's exactly the same way lenses work.
One of the biggest mistakes people make in portrait photography is to have their subject
right next to say where they're photographing them, a wall for example. So what we're going
to show here, we're going to show the difference between having our subject right next to the
wall and then we're going to bring Courtney away from the wall and show you how much the
picture can be improved by having your subject closer to the camera and the wall further
away. I'll just show you.
Now here I'm going to take a picture of Courtney looking along the line of the wall. Again so
Courtney's face will be in focus and as the wall goes out of focus towards the distance
it'll give us a very very nice effect. Now notice I've sat Courtney down here and she's
going to look towards me and I'm sitting towards where the light is coming from from the sun.
So although it's a bit cloudy and it's a bit overcast the light is coming from that direction
therefore that's the direction I'm going to get Courtney to look at.
We've come down underneath the harbour in St Peterport here and it's quite dark and
dingy but we're going to use this to our advantage. What we're going to do is we're going to change
the mood of our portrait shots now using some off-camera flash and we're going to pose our
model Courtney over in the corner there and light her from the side and we're going to
show how you can change the mood of a picture completely just using a little bit of flash
off away from the camera.
Areas like this that have got big natural openings are great also because these light
comes down and as it comes through the opening it's almost like a big softbox light we use
down the studio and this gives great catch lights in the eyes. I'm going to take a couple
of pictures using just a reflector with Courtney.
We can see a reflection action. You see here she's going to reflect some light back into
Courtney's face and you see the difference there you see there's a really nice light
being reflected in and this is just natural light being reflected back into Courtney's
face it's just a really soft natural light nothing too hard nothing too hard but really
nice.
Another advantage of using wide apertures like f1.8 is as we've seen earlier it throws
the background out of focus nicely but we can also use that to our advantage if the background
isn't as exciting what we can do is we can throw it out of focus using again if you remember
the pencil test we're going to bring our model close to us and have the Christmas tree in
the background far away so it gives a nice soft out of focus look to the picture.
Here we are in the back streets of town and what we're going to do is we're going to use
a technique we're going to underexpose the background and we're going to light our subject
again with a bit of off-camera flash but this time from slightly above our head so it throws
some shadows over our eyes so what we're going to do is we're going to change the mood completely
so we're going to go for like a bit of a grungy look.
