More than just focus

What are the things that are most appealing about portraits?  I have my short list, and an image to illustrate.

1) Off center lighting.  The light shouldn’t be coming from the flash mounted on your camera or a flash on the camera.

2) Blurry background.  This helps you to focus on the subject and not notice that squirrel in the tree.

3) Eyes that are sharply in focus.

In this image of Lauren, I have those 3 requirements covered quite nicely.  The first two are easily achieved.  If you have your flash off camera, you get number one.  And as long as you know how to dial down your aperture, getting a blurred background is easy.  But getting the eyes in sharp focus takes a bit more than just focusing on the eyes.  You see one thing many people don’t realize is that there is more to focus than just focusing.

You need to have plenty of light on your subject to get the sensor to distinguish between the pixels.  You need to have your pixel sensitivity or ISO turned down, 100 if you can but most cameras work quite well at 200.  Your lens isn’t at it’s sharpest wide open.  In this case I could have set it at f3.5, but the lens is actually sharper between f5.6 and f8.  The smaller aperture means that the light goes through less surface of you lens and thus makes more of the image in focus.  Since I wanted to blur out the background I chose the more open end of that, f5.6.  And finally your shutter speed needs to match.  This is a hard concept for many people.  When you think of a shutter speed of 1/10 of a second you think you will have a blurry image and difficult to focus.  But that’s not the case since we are using a flash to illuminate the subject.  The flash will freeze the action, so you just need the shutter to match your other settings for the environment.

Don’t believe me?  Lets take a look closeup.  This is part of the unmodified image out of the camera.  There’s nothing done to this image other than the standard color correction. As you can see, the eyes are sharp.  They have that classy glassy look to them that comes from being in sharp focus and having the flash (with a big umbrella) supplying enough light for the sensor easily capture the color of each pixel through a small portion of your lens.  That can almost be consider an equation, but we’ll call it a recipe for a sharp portrait.