So I consider myself a designer and not a photographer. Most designers enjoy photography and usually work with many photos when dealing with design, so naturally there is a fuzzy line between design and photography.
A good friend of the family has a baby a few months ago and wanted to some pictures of their newling taken for memory and announcement purposes. Now I am no professional photographer by any means, but I have myself some nice equipment and have a high interest in photography. This was a nice opportunity to take my designers eye to the back of an SLR camera and try to come up with some great photos for a friend and some experience for me.
Here are a handful of images from the mini photo shoot. I will let you be the judge. Am I a decent photographer? What could I have done to make the photos better? What did I do that you particularly like? Let me know in the comments below.
Feel free to leave any constructive criticism in the comments. You like? You don’t like? Let me know.
Tyler,
Great work on the baby pix. I would like to know more on the technicalities… such as lighting specifics, lenses used, and of course that cool short focal length effect (I’m guessing you tossed a macro on there or something). Thanks
Lighting was just an East facing window. I used a a fixed lens which was the canon 50mm @1.8mm. Depth of Field to make the foreground and background blurry is controlled through by 2 variables; The Focal Length of the lens and the aperture your shooting at. The greater the focal length and the faster the aperture the greater depth of field.
So in this case I was shooting at a focal length of 50mm and since I was using anywhere from 1.8-2.8 aperture I got that nice narrow depth of field. Does that help?
Hope all is well out there in Cali.
-Tyler
Aperture isn’t a measured of speed. Aperture is a measure of the size of hole that is letting the light strike the film/sensor. So setting your lens to 1.8 is not necessarily “faster” than 22 since this does not move when the photo is taken. The Speed would be a reference to the shutter. This does change speed, allowing more or less light in. How fast the shutter moves has no direct effect on depth of field only exposure.
The other main factor in depth of field is how close to the subject you are. And in this case with the 50mm lens i would say that the focal distance to the subject has much more to do with the limited depth of field than the 50mm lens.
But your theory is correct just got some of the geek talk mixed up. Oh and im two games away from some street tacos Umm cant wait.
Well that’s about the cutest baby i’ve ever seen! i think you did an amazing job with the photos, thanks!