"Just Waiting For Friends”

"Just Waiting For Friends”
©David A. Ziser

You know, when you look at this image, it represents a simple, classic, straight forward  portrait of the couple.  It does a good job of flattering the two people in front of the camera and that’s what a good portrait should always do.  Although it’s a portrait of a bride and groom, the lighting, location, composition work for anyone I could have photographed in this same location.

Let’s take a quick minute to analyze this image. First, the lighting has a nice look to it coming in from camera right creating a nice flattering loop lighting pattern on the couple. The lighting from the flash, about 8 feet away and shooting through my Zumbrella at 1/8 power, is perfectly balanced with the ambient light. That gives me a well lit image of the couple in their surrounds.

Notice too how I squared all the horizontal and vertical lines being careful with my camera placement to avoid any convergence of lines  in any direction. In effect, the plane of the CMOS sensor was perfectly parallel with the couple and perpendicular to the floor.

This squaring off of the horizontal and vertical elements created a nice square “interior frame” in the image, the back wall behind the couple, in which I placed the bride and groom.

Also look at how I brought them together – her leaning against him, him leaning against her, both with wrists below the waist created a “pyramid” structure to their bodies that implies a sense of closeness between them.

And lastly, positioning them in the bottom right quadrant of the frame, or nodal point #1, finished the composition for the couple.  As I said earlier, it is a simple, straightforward portrait, but a lot of thinking and planning went into it to make it appear that way and give us a great result.

Camera specs: Canon 5D fitted with 70-300mm lens at 80mm, F6.3 @ 1/60 second, ISO 800.  Enjoy!  -David