"A Look Of Kindness For The Arts"

"A Look Of Kindness For The Arts"
©David A. Ziser

This is actually one of the images I’m featuring in today’s Technique Tuesday episode exploring on-location portraiture.  Give the next post a read and watch the video for the rest of the story.

The challenge was to find a good location within the Contemporary Art Museum in Cincinnati, Ohio to take this portrait, quickly and efficiently while not disturbing the Center’s daily activities.  This location was a new “install” on the third floor of the facility and  traffic was somewhat light for this day’s shoot.

This was one of my favorite portraits from that particular year’s “Inspiring Volunteers” shoot.  I just loved the lady’s gentle look.  The most interesting observations I made about all the volunteers was how genuinely kind and gentle each person was. Among the entire cross section of all those I photographed, that was the common denominator for all of them.

As I say in today’s tutorial, I needed to work fast – only 60 minutes for each portrait and that included our travel, site survey, and photography. 

Camera specs: Nikon D1x (yes, back in my Nikon days) fitted with 15mm lens*, F5.6 @ 1/20 second, ISO 800.  Enjoy!  -David

*p.s.  I don’t even think Nikon had a lens out in 2004 at that focal length yet my EXIF data is showing a 15-31mm lens shot at 15mm.  It’s a mystery to me since I don’t remember owning a lens at that focal length – ever.

I did own an 18-35mm Nikon lens at that time which was the widest lens I had in my gear bag.  It was my go-to lens for wide angle portraits and that’s what I suspect I used  in this example.  I’m still stumped as to why the EXIF data is showing 15-31mm lens Mfg unknown.  Hey, it’s unknown to me too.

I think it have something to do with how the APS sized sensor D1x camera registered the focal length data for this full frame lens – 18-35 is the same ration as 15-30mm. So, I think the 15mm setting here is equivalent to the 188mm setting on the 18-25mm Nikon lens  -David