More f/2.2 – In color this time

I mentioned yesterday that I would post more photos from my f/2.2 experiment on Friday. Here they are. The only adjustments I made were to correct the white balance as there seems to be a bit of a disconnect between my camera and Adobe Bridge, and I bumped the exposure on a couple of them to brighten the photos a bit. Lighting for all: Diffused daylight through my office window and white fluorescent lights above (set to low). No reflectors. (I’m still trying to talk Sweetie into letting me shoot him today. In the meantime, he’s off flying his radio-controlled plane with his pals.)

Day 118 – Starting to get the hang of it

If you can stand another self-portrait. I’m fascinated with shallow depth of field portraiture, so I was experimenting today – on myself again since I had no one else at hand. I’ll have to try this on Sweetie this weekend, if he’ll let me. I think I could get better results if I didn’t have to rely on auto-focus to get the shot.

I shot this in my office. Lighting: diffused daylight to camera right and I held a large white box cover camera left to fill in the shadows on my right side (your left). Shot at ISO 100, 1/60s at f/2.2. The extremely shallow DOF puts my eyes in focus but makes the rest of my face and hair quickly fall off into blur, and even my nose is slightly out of focus. I really like this effect when I see it, and from what I’ve read, can be an effective technique when shooting the “mature” face.

Day 112 – f/1.8

Playing with my 50mm lens again today. I really love the flexibility it provides as far as depth of field, but with opportunity comes challenge. Today I experimented with very shallow depth of field. It is quite the challenge to find that sweet spot, but oh how I love the effect of falling off focus! f/1.8 was a bit too tight, so I stopped down a bit to 2.2. The best results of both are below.