Brief:
Find a location with good light for a portrait shot. Place your subject some distance in front of a simple background and select a wide aperture together with a moderately long focal length such as 100mm on a 35mm full-frame camera (about 65mm on a cropped-frame camera). Take a viewpoint about one and a half metres from your subject, allowing you to compose a headshot comfortably within the frame. Focus on the eyes and take the shot.
I used the same subject for this as for the previous exercise and took these shots on the same occasion.
I used two lenses for this – an 85mm and a 50mm prime lens, both with largest aperture of f1.2. I initially used the longer 85mm lens and later shots were with the 50mm lens. I have found that although an 85mm lens gives a natural looking perspective for portraits of humans, to fit the head of a horse into the frame I need to stand at a distance from the subject and therefore get a flattened perspective. For this reason I used the 50mm lens for later shots to be able to get the entire head in frame from a position where one would normally look at a horse like this. I used these lenses for this exercise as the very large aperture gives a very narrow depth of field; much narrower than my 24-105mm zoom with f4. At times this is so narrow that the horse’s nose is out of focus if the eye is focussed, however the sharp eye draws the observer’s gaze and this seems less important.
The contact sheet of all the images from this shoot are at:
I have processed a selection with minor cropping and local exposure adjustments.
Andrew Procter 