When people think of portrait photography they usually think of contrived shots with a fake backdrop, studio lighting and fake smiles. For me portrait photography is more about capturing real people in the moment. I started doing portraiture quite by accident after a family outing to Bolton Abbey. Rain meant that photographing the Abbey and grounds wasn’t going to happen so I turned the camera on my family instead with some very good results.

While most people say you should use 85-135mm 35mm equivalent lenses for portraits (roughly 70mm to 100mm on my camera) I tend to go for a longer 70-200mm lens, quite often with a 2x teleconveter to give 140-400mm. The shots of my brother and nephew were both done with the teleconverter meaning I could shoot them from quite a distance away and they had no idea they were being photographed, hence the great natural expression.

Ironically enough the 100mm macro is also a great portrait lens giving great bokeh to the backround. The lens is also less intrusive than the 24-70 f2.8 L or the 70-200 f2.8 L meaning people are more at ease (shoving a large lens in peoples faces tends to terrify them).

Of course there is nothing to say you can’t get a bit creative with your portraits. This shot of my niece was done with a 50mm f1.4 close up giving a slightly distorted perspective, and the shot of Poppy is done with the 100mm macro at a very close distance meaning her face fills the frame nicely.

Portraits don’t just have to be of people, they can also be of pets (I would argue that calling pictures of pets ‘wildlife’ photography is stretching a point somewhat), although it can be somewhat harder to get them to do what you want.

All images in this post can be found at images from… under the portraits gallery.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 19th, 2008 at 7:57 am and is filed under Portraits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.