In this video I'll show you guys how
changing your aperture can give you
completely different results, when you're
shooting portraits!
Welcome back to The Breakdown.
My name is Miguel Quiles. I am
here in downtown Denville, New Jersey
with Ashley once again, and forgive the
sound of the traffic, because we are kind
of on the side of a road right now.
I will kind of add this as a little extra
bonus piece to this video that if you're
looking for a really cool interesting
place to shoot, sometimes you'll end up
like me where I'm just driving around
town, and I'm like hey this looks like a
really cool place, let me stop and take
photos! This is literally just the side
of a random road, and you'll see how the
pictures will turn out. It's kind of a
cool spot, but what we're going to talk
about today, is selecting your aperture,
and how that impacts what your portraits
actually end up looking like. So what
we're going to do is, we're going to take some
photos with the 85 mm, 1.8 lens.
Now let's show you the difference
between taking a portrait wide open at
85 1.8 versus taking a portrait at maybe
something like a f/5.6 or an f/8. So to
start off with, we are shooting with a
6500, and we're going to shoot these shots
wide open now. One of the things that's
really helpful for me is. I have the
electronic viewfinder that gives me a
live exposure. So I could actually see as
I'm dialing in my settings, what the end
result is going to be. It's going to come in
handy right now. So Ashley, what I'm
going to have you do is, you're going to stand right
here in front of me. We're going to use this
small reflector, it's just the silver,
maybe a foot-and-a-half reflector. It's
pretty small, I'm just going to have you
hold on to that, and I want to keep this
simple. You can definitely get a
reflector stand that would be much
better for your models, and your subjects,
because they don't have to hold the
reflector, but we're going to keep it really
basic, because maybe, I don't know, maybe
you don't have a stand, and you just want
to make these types of portraits work. So
you could have your model hold it, just
like this. We're going to dial in our
settings, we're going to be at f/1.8 ISO 100,
and we're going to try 1 over 320th
of a second. We're going to see what
that looks like here,
and so we're shooting wide open, and the
goal here when you're shooting portraits,
is you want to blur the background, and I
think this is probably the most common
way that people will shoot portraits is
to shoot whatever wide open is on your
lens. So if it's at a f/1.8 or f/1.4, very
common to shoot portraits that way. Now
the advantage of it is, if you have a
really distracting background, you're
going to blur the background, and it will
make your subjects stand out. However on
the flip side, what it also does is, it
actually eliminates skin texture, because
what happens is, I'll get her eyes
perfectly sharpened in focus, but then
everything else just kind of gets blurry.
Her skin gets blurry, her ears get blurry,
That could be okay, if you don't want to
spend a lot of time in post-production
retouching the photo, you can shoot it up
1.8, and it's going to blur
pretty much everything except the eyes,
which is good. What I like to do is, I
like to get a lot of texture in the skin.
I like to have portraits that kind of
have like a high definition type of look,
and in order to do that, I shoot at a
higher f-stop to accomplish that, so I
want to show you the difference between
shooting and wide open, and then we're
going to shoot this right now at an f/5.6,
which, if you have a kit lens you should
be able to even shoot it in f/5.6 and it's
going to end up looking really good. Now if
I bring my f-stop up to 5.6, so I'm going to
have to change my ISO, and my shutter in
order to be able to take this photo. So
we're going to bring our speed down to
1/200th of a second, and I'm
actually going to bring my ISO up to
1/320th. Now you might be asking me
well why do you have to shoot at 1/200th
if she's not moving. The key is
that I want to minimise the blur that's
happening for me hand holding this
camera, as well as her, she might move
around. So if I shoot it at a 200th of a
second, that should hopefully get us a
really nice sharp shot. So if I'm at a
1/200th, I have to bring my ISO up to
compensate. So that I could be at f/5.6 so
again that lands me at f/5.6 1.3 or
1/200th of a second, ISO 320.
I want you to really take
notice of the differences between
shooting at f/1.8 vs. f/5.6, and obviously
as I like continue to increase my
aperture, if I go to f/8 and f/11 you
start to get more detail in the skin,
more texture. It does create a little bit
more work for you in post-production, but
it looks pretty cool.
All right so that is the differences
between shooting at different apertures
when you're shooting portraits!
Let me know what questions you have in the
comments section below. While you're here
make sure that you follow Ashley on her
social media platforms that are going to
be linked in the description for this
video. Follow me as well, I post images all
the time, sharing my settings and all that
kind of good stuff, also follow Adoramatv.
Subscribe to their channel here on
youtube they have new videos coming out
all the time, including my show which
comes out every other Thursday, and also
check out the Adorama Learning Center
there's a lot of great articles there as
well, that will teach you everything you
need to know about photography and
videography, and all that good stuff.
Thanks for watching The Breakdown once
again I will see you in the next video