Monday, May 21, 2012

"Central Park Beauty"

0009- Friday Recap - 919C4638

"Central Park Beauty"
©David A. Ziser 

This is another image I captured at last weeks B&H Shootout in Central Park. Part of my lesson to the attendees was how and why to shoot with wide angle lenses. I love shooting with wide angle lenses because of how the lens accentuates the convergence of lines.  The steps in this photograph illustrate the point perfectly. See how the “lines” work as a very dynamic background for our subject.

The secret to shooting wide angle portraits is to keep the subject away from the corners of the frame. To not do so will severely distort their “body parts”.  You have to be equally careful about how close you position the subject to the edge of the frame. 

Lighting was also a challenge for this image.  The lighting was quite flat and uninteresting as we were photographing between 12:00 and 3:00.  I dropped a Westcott silver reflector just out of the scene camera right.  I then used my on-camera flash, rotated it to bounce into the reflector, to give me the off-camera light I wanted for this photograph.  LaDawn had inadvertently laid my Quantum flash on the ground, while still in the on position, just out of camera range camera left.  The light firing from that flash created the “hair light” you see in the image.

Lighting, composition, expression, all came together for  very cool photograph of our model.

Camera specs: Canon 5D Mark III fitted with Sigma 12-24mm IS lens at 20mm, F6.3 @ 1/160 second, ISO 200.  Enjoy!  -David

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