Hey, this is Daniel Norton, I'm here in my
studio in New York City with Maria, and
we're going to make some portraits, but I
want to talk in this video about... depth
of field. I get this question a lot, and
people talk a lot about you know, using
depth of field be it shallow or
deep, or whatever you want to do. So we're
just going to kind of run through a really
simple portrait set up. Kind of the way
that I would shoot it, and then we're
going to play around with depth of field ,and
see if we can create an even better
shot, and, and see how it looks. So I have
my one of my favorite softbox is here,
this is the Shimira
Pro 2...
- so it's the the flat front one.. so
you don't have the edges. Throws a lot of
light around, great if you're going to want
to use one light, it's in the Profoto B1X,
it's bouncing down onto this white
card which is throwing light back up
into her face creating just kind of a
nice even wash of light across her face.
First thing I always do, is I want to
make sure that none of the light in the
space is affecting my shot. So I'm at
let's see I am at a 1/250th a 5.6 at 100
ISO, so now I make a photo... and it should
be black. It is.. okay so I'm tethered
in to Capture One here. Here, so I can see
what I'm doing, and I've got my Canon
here. I have the 85mm f/1.2 ..cause we're
going to play around with the shallow depth
of field, and like I said I'm at f/5.6 so
right now she's straight on to me. I'm
just going toset my focus nice and even.
As expected we got a decent amount of depth
of field, here you know, her eyes nice and
sharp. You're starting to get a little
out of focus back here at the edge of
her hairline, but the hair around her
face is nice and sharp, and the
background even though we've got this
like paneled wall, you can see the line
still. So it's got a decent amount of
focus, but not so much in focus that.. it's
distracting. Let's see so that's at f/5.6
Let's just... I'm just going to go wide first,
cause people love to go wide open, that's
why you buy these lenses right? So I'm
going to go, we'll just do it, we're going to go
all the way to 1.2... see I'm going to adjust
my light using the controller here, down,
that's about 4.5 ish
stops. So let's see if we can get to
where we want to be. So looking right
at me, so when you're shooting this wide
open, you definitely want to be wary of
your focus. Oh wow! Okay, so we can see
may even be a smidge dark there, we can
definitely see, her eyes are sharp now, but
check out the difference here.
You may notice something else
interesting about this color, and the
reason why the color is a little bit
weird, is because I got the modeling
light on, and that's affecting our shot
so I'm going to kill the modeling light. I
mean you could actually shoot just with
the modeling light, if you really wanted
to. There we go, that should clean it up,
there we go, now we've got the shallow
depth of field with relatively clean
color. It's a little bit dark, cause I didn't do
my math exactly right.. Let me see if I
can get it a little bit brighter, I'm
gonna turn this light up. Let's say 3/10's...
There we go! That's pretty much closer to
proper exposure. So yeah, you can play
around with this depending on the look
you're going for, and I think if we're
going to use a shallow depth of field
like this, we should kind of accentuate.
She has all this beautiful hair, but I
have it all, the focal plane of her face,
so let's have you pull it back, so I can
actually watch it kind of drift back.
Yeah look even with that, yeah, even like
kind of just, let, yeah, there right there,
that's it, put your chin forward a little bit,
all right now, I'm being very careful
with my focus, here we go.
Yeah now we can see it really dropping
off. You can see the edge of her face
even right here, like just completely
going soft and beautiful, now see if you
turn more with your face like this.
Now, if you're going to do this I can guarantee
you one eye is probably going to be out of
focus at this point. So I'm going to
focus on the near eye, you only pick one
eye. You typically want to focus on the
near eye. You can see here, that this is a
creating kind of a certain effect. I'm
not a huge fan of this. Personally if I'm
going to shoot somebody slightly in profile
I don't want half their face
out-of-focus. So if we're going to stay like
that I'm going to now go back. Let's
drift back up to, let's say.. we go to
we give myself about two more stops of
light, focus there. Oh! Perfect, she puts to
sleep, it's not enough depth of field, so
I'm going to give myself a little bit more,
so I'm bringing it, bringing the light up
one stop. Closing down the lens, one stop,
see that go to f/4, eyes open, no problem,
so now we're at f/4, and while it's not
tack, tack sharp across her whole eye. It
looks like it's going out right at the
edge of the lashes, it's still going to
give us in my opinion, more superior look,
right! So sometimes, a really shallow
depth-of-field can look cool. Let's say
on the straight on shot, but you have to
be a little weary if you're going to start
doing other poses, that it could become
maybe too much. Now going the other way,
just to kind of show you what we got. We
could go, we close down a lot. let's go
one, two, three stops... to 11. This is at f/11..
there should be pretty, pretty, deep focus
here now. See the backgrounds getting
sharper, just for the heck of it. I'll go
another stop to f/16,
and we're getting closer, and closer now.
The other thing that affects your depth of
field though, another major thing, is
camera distance to subject, and also
subject to whatever else is in the shot,
like the background. So if I were to just
take Maria, and have her go all the ways
back, fifty feet. No it's not that far,
it's maybe like, four, four more feet back.
I'm going to compensate for the distance, my
lights turned up all the way. Someone's
going to close down, back down to eleven for
a second. Using the inverse square law,
we're going to see how sharp she
becomes relative to the background. Okay
so it's a little hot. Cause, I was just
guessing at that point, there we go,
so we can see now the background is
getting sharper and even that's enough,
11, but even if I were to close down
to let's say a 4, which was kind of
borderline before all kind of stuff was
happening here, it's like 3 more
stops, we should still get a decent amount of
depth of field. So depending on even at 4,
we're still getting most of her face, and
her hair, and we're getting a little bit
of the background, and focus. So again
distance from subject to the background,
distance to the camera, and also f-stop,
are going to be what's going to affect
your your depth of field. So come forward
for one last one, cause you always have to
end with the really wide open shot. Paid
a lot of money for this lens, got to make
it happen! Right anybody who has the f/1.2
lens knows that you have to
always shoot at f/1.2 ...
now I think, also, I'm, ISO 100.
Luckily, the it's kind of, the end
of the day here. So I'm able to pull this
off sometimes, if you want to shoot these
really shallow depth of field
portraits, you got to be a little weary
because... if there's a lot of light in the
space, you may not be able to to pull it
off, because it starts to,
you start to pick up too much of the ambient light.
Cut... split the difference...
Cool there we go, now I'm back to that
really kind of shallow, give me that like
Supergirl. You can't see it here,
you only see the top half of her, but she
has a full Supergirl outfit on there! We
go, beautiful, nice and shallow, pretty shot,
really clean. Playing around with the
idea of the color too, by the way, if
you didn't notice that she has a red shirt
on. I mean you know with the green
background, think about that when you're
working on portraits. It's kind of
another way to work, so remember use your
depth of field. But don't think you
always have to be either wide open... or
super closed down when things need to be
in focus. Every aperture in between has
its place depending on what you're doing!
And you can create a lot of interesting
shots in portraiture, with various
apertures. So you can follow Maria on
Maria DeCotis on all the social media.
I'll put the link in the description.
Follow me on Facebook danielnortonphotographer
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AdoramaTV and I'll see you next time OnSet.