Understanding Portrait Lenses Part 2: Exploring Photography with Mark Wallace
[Music] hi everybody welcome to another episode of exploring photography right here on adoramatv it's brought to you by adorama it's the camera store that has everything see the bold piece of photography equipment so make sure you check them out at adorama.com well we are continuing this is part two of help with which lens should I buy specifically which lens should you buy for portrait photography and so joining me today is Natasha she is going to be helping us understand some things about the distance of our camera's lens from our subject now if you didn't check it out make sure you watch last week's episode where I talked about field of view and depth of field and distance from subject to lens all kinds of technical things but now we're going to put that into practice in this very small studio now one thing I want to point out is this isn't a tiny studio but we're trying to emulate a tiny studio specifically because a lot of people want to buy wide-angle lenses when they shoot in very very small studios but a lot of seasoned professionals will say don't do that make sure you use a longer lens of fifty or seventy or longer and so what we've done here in this studio is we've sort of shrunk it by not using this space back here so we're not using this intentionally we've got a gray background back here so we're trying to shrink this studio just a little bit to make it look more like a tiny studio all right so why is it that so many photographers will tell you to buy a lens that is 70 millimeters or longer maybe fifty at the very edge to shoot portraits well it all has to do with the angle of view problems that we get and most importantly the distance between our camera and our subject and what that does so let's start with a misnomer and that is that wide-angle lenses distort faces actually don't it's the distance so let me walk you through this so what I have here is I have a Canon 5d Mark 3 and I've got a 24 to 105 lens so I've got a wide-angle lens and I've got a telephoto lens all in one and so I first want to show you that wide-angle lenses don't actually distort face it's the distance that does that so I'm going to go back here there's a little stool and I'm going to shoot two pictures now the first one I'm going to shoot at 24 millimeters and we're going to get everything in this shot so it is the studio and it's Natasha and it's the background lights that's okay what I'm doing is I'm keeping Natasha's face right in the center of the screen I'm going to take a second shot from the exact same location but this time zoomed in I'll take a picture of that now what I'm going to do here is I'm going to take these two shots and I'm going to crop both of them so that they match so we have the same amount of Natasha's face in both shots now watch what happens when we crop them and put them side by side you'll notice that the wide-angle shot while her face looks the same as it does from a telephoto shot the wide-angle lens is not distorting her face but watch what happens when we put our wide-angle lens on our camera and I fill the frame by getting close now what I'm doing instead of going far away and cropping which you shouldn't do I'm going to get the frame nice and full by getting close and watch what happens that to get really really close and that is not something you normally want to do with your model because look at this shot now our face looks wonky it is distorted because we're so darn close that it starts to work things and makes a natasha feel a little bit uncomfortable because nobody wants a camera like ah right in their face that's really the main reason why you don't want a wide-angle lens because if you get really close it makes things wonky when you're that close and we also have field of view problems in other words we're starting to see these strip lights in the back light and this light up here and everything and it's really messy by zooming in it cleans everything up our field of view shrinks like we saw in our last episode and it's really nice and simple okay so the other reason that a wide-angle lens messes things up it's because the relationships between things get all wonky let me illustrate this now we already said that Natasha is a little annoyed when I get close to her and so Natasha give me your best bass stay away so watch what happens to her hand so I'm going to have your hand about right there take a little picture here oh my gosh her hand is gigantic it's huge the reason for that is because her hand is so much closer to the camera than her face it makes your hand look gigantic and her face look really small that's sort of the distortion that people are talking about it's not the lens necessarily it's the distance between the subject and the lens watch what happens when I walk back here we're going to take the same picture but now I'm going to zoom my lens so I'm going to zoom in we'll sit down here so Natasha give me the get back and I'm going to take a shot now look her hand looks more proportional to her head it looks just like it should little blown out because it's too close to the light but you can see the difference there and so the point of this is if you're shooting portraits even in a small studio you need to get back and zoom in that's going to put distance between you and your subjects that's going to make things look more natural it's going to narrow the angle of view that will clean things up it'll make your model more comfortable in the space and everything is going to be much much better so the question is well what do you do if you want to shoot full-length shots in a very small space well my suggestion is find a different space find something that works for what you're trying to do the other question is is there ever an exception to the rule can you shoot portraits with a wide-angle lens well absolutely and that's what we're going to do next well this is the quintessential exception to the rule it's the environmental portrait what that means is we want a portrait of a person in their environment now we're going to mimic this by having Natasha here in this kitchen having her morning coffee getting ready for the day and so I want to make sure I get a great portrait of her but also I want to get some of the surrounding area here so I can put her in context now to do that I am using a 35 millimeter lens now that's not an extremely wide lens but it's definitely wider than what you'd normally use for a headshot or an in studio portrait but a lot of people consider a 35 millimeter lens the perfect environmental portrait lens now this guy here I can when all the way up to an aperture of f2 and that's great because with a wide-angle lens that allows me to get nice soft shallow depth of field but not so shallow that this falls completely out of context I can still see these shapes and it's nice and identifiable but it's also nice and soft now as with all wide-angle lenses this is something that you really should consider as a close-up lens so I'm going to be shooting pretty close to Natasha but I want to make sure I don't distort for too much by putting her at the edges of the frame so what I'll do is I'll put her either to the right third or the left third and then let the scene take up the other two-thirds of the image I'm saying a lot of words let's put it into practice and show you exactly how you can make a portrait that looks fantastic [Music] I really like that shot of you having the coffee you got a nice after cocky smile going on it's pretty good thank you so much for joining us Natasha and thank you for joining us for this episode of exploring photography don't forget to subscribe to adoramatv that way you don't miss a single episode like last week's episode that helps us understand what we're doing this week also make sure you check out the Adorama Learning Center because we have videos and articles and things that will help you understand things like depth of field and field of view and aperture and shutter speeds and all that kind of stuff and all of it is absolutely free so make sure you check that up thanks again for joining us and we will see you again next time
