|
Forum: Mini-Challenges, Games, and Photo Stories
10-05-2009, 11:11 AM
|
| |
Heck, let's not stop at 35mm...
K24mm lens on 135 film (16mm in APS-C FOV) 
Zenitar 16mm fisheye on digital (~14mm in rectilinear FOV) 
(too bad about the exposure, the RTF does not play well with that lens). |
|
Forum: Mini-Challenges, Games, and Photo Stories
10-05-2009, 11:05 AM
|
| |
Thanks for your comments. Using the wide-angle lenses, I have to pick the background a bit more carefully. With long lenses, I get her to turn her head about 30-45 degrees from head-on which brings makes her cheeks look narrower as well as adding depth to her face.
She is a ham indeed, one of my best subjects.
|
|
Forum: Mini-Challenges, Games, and Photo Stories
10-04-2009, 05:24 PM
|
| |
Thanks for your kind comments.
Focal length is highly over-rated for portraits for 2 reasons.
First, distance to subject is more important.
For most of the shots above, if I cropped the images by 50% (i.e. cropping the subjects to head & shoulders), then the resulting FOV would be equal to shooting the same subject from the same distance at 70mm (or 52mm for the last image) which is a typical 'portrait' FL on APS-C.
Second, typical long 'portrait' FL's (such as 70~135mm) are chosen to de-exaggerate the subjects' facial features...which is a Euro-centric approach.
Longer FL's are fine for flattening a more European head (or any ethnicity) that has a narrow face + large nose. But many of my Asian subjects' faces are the opposite, wide-faces + small eyes and nose, and too long an FL further flattens their faces. I find wider FL's give more depth and character to Asian (or any wide/flat face).
For example, these 2 images were composed with the same subject size, only one at 18mm (left) and the other at 55mm (a moderate 'portrait' length) right. The latter does flatten but does not flatter the subject who already has an unusually wide face.
 
The longer FL does crop the distractions out of the background nicely.
|
|
Forum: Mini-Challenges, Games, and Photo Stories
10-04-2009, 07:47 AM
|
| |
35mm (on APS-C) is a nice length for half-body shots and/or environmental portraits.
All with DA 35mm Ltd:
f/3.2, ISO800 
f/2.8, ISO800 
f/4, ISO1600, 1/10s 
f/3.2, ISO800 
f/4, ISO800  ...and to mix it up, one from 26mm (DA-L 18-55)
f/5.6, ISO400  |
