Portrait Panorama 2
Originally uploaded by Ryan Smith Photography
I haven’t posted to the blog in a while, if I have a brief thought I usually put in on Twitter. This picture isn’t perfect; it’s my first try on my wife of a new technique from Ryan Brenizer, an amazing wedding photographer. Depending on how much you know about photography, you might know that short depth of field, in other words a really out of focus soft background, is created by a really wide aperture as well as focal length. So to really get a background really out of focus and really highlight a subject, you need to really zoom in on the subject. Basically, you either have a wide angle shot where the background is in focus, or a zoomed in shot for example of a face where the background is really blurry. I hope I explained that in a way that makes sense.
With the Brenizer technique you can get both wide angle and zoomed in depth of field. You do this by quickly taking 10 or 20 shots with a longer zoom such as 85+mm close in on the subject. For example shooting the head, moving down the body, then all around the subject to take in the background on manual focus so the focus point always stays on the subjects face. Photoshop has an amazing tool called photostich that can take a lot of random pictures of a location and stitch them all together into a single image. Doing this you look like you used a wide angle lens, but you have the depth of field of a zoom. It’s pretty amazing. However it takes some practice to get it right, if I have an upcoming wedding with you, you will probably be experimented on a bit, hopefully we can get something unique and amazing you haven’t seen before.
