Focal Length

This exercise had me very stressed to begin with, not because I didn't understand what to do but because of circumstances totally beyond my control i.e. the weather! Christmas didn't help either as everyone was understandably very busy with their own life's to have a lot of spare time to help me out.


Finally I decided the only thing to do was to use my home studio and do the best I could.


I needed to take the same photograph but at different focal lengths to see which was the most flattering,

The first photograph was taken at 48mm I use my 50mm lens quite a bit when photographing people so I knew where to stand to get the most flattering image.

This was taken using f8 1/160's shutter speed a flash white balance and and iso of 100.
Post production work was:  The highlights were toned down slightly in camera raw as the side of her face was just a bit too bright.  I then opened elements and created a duplicate layer and evened out the white back ground using a mixture of paint brush and levels. I then flatten the image and used the unsharp tool.

This is quite  a nice image although I admit to being slightly disappointed the extra 2 mm seemed to make a bit of a difference which I wasn't really expecting.


The second photograph was taken at 18mm. I kept to the same camera settings and used the same post production on this photograph as last time.

 

This time it is quite clear to see how unflattering this focal length is when you are up close to the subject. The bottom half of her face looks longer but also the nose looks bigger and far more prominent than it really is, deep lines are also shown in the smile line.  I would not be happy showing a sitter this photograph.

The third photograph was taken at 85mm which a lot of people consider to be the ideal focal length for a portrait.  Again I kept to the same settings and post production.

This I think is my favourite photograph out of the three of them, the features are clear but not distorted as they are in the 18mm photograph, the sitter looks more relaxed as she doesn't have the camera in her face, and there is a softness to the skin.


I tried to keep the framing consistent as much as possible, although this was difficult with the limited amount of space I had available to me for this exercise.