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Chapter Four: Creative Control: Using Your Lens

Focal Length Portrait Comparison

Gear: Your camera, and as many different focal lengths as you can get a hold of. Zoom lenses are great for this exercise—just be sure to treat each focal length as a variable prime lens.¹

Subject: One of your many patient and willing friends

Comparing and Understanding Focal Lengths

The ability to instinctively choose a lens comes from experience. One way to expand your knowledge of the lenses you work with is to compare them all with a single subject.

For this exercise, you’ll create a series of portraits. As a bonus, you’ll experience a variety of working distances—from inches away from your subject’s nose to far enough away that you’ll need to shout. When you’re working two feet from the tip of your subject’s nose, you create an intimacy that can either be fun and interesting or intimidating and invasive. When you’re 20 feet away from your subject, they might feel lost and alone—or more able to relax and be themselves. There is no right distance. The trick is to consider the level of intimacy you want to create between yourself and your subject and explore how your lens will enable it.

By doing this test, you’ll see compression and perspective changes, the effects of magnification and scale and noticeable distortions in shape. Take a look at the grid of test images in the “Focal Length Portrait Comparison” (Figure 4.7). These were shot against a neutral background to draw attention to the various ways the face and lens interact. The face was placed in the “sweet spot” of the lens—purposefully away from the edges of the frame.

Setup

You’ll want to compose roughly the same shot with each focal length you have access to. This means moving your camera and recomposing each time. Don’t worry about switching the lenses without moving. You want the framing to be similar, but it doesn’t need to be exact.

Steps

1. Start with your longest focal length. You’ll work your way to the shortest focal length. Frame up a tight headshot.
2. Set your camera to Manual mode and choose an aperture that’s available on all your lenses, so you can be consistent; ƒ/5.6 would be great. Now choose a shutter speed that will let you work handheld comfortably; 1/250th or faster is a good choice. Balance these settings with an ISO speed that gives you a good, normal exposure.
3. Take a few shots here.
4. Change to the next focal length and move forward. Compose a similar headshot, and take the a few shots here.
5. Repeat until you’ve covered the range of lenses you brought with you.

Observations

Ingest your images into Lightroom (or whichever application you prefer) and sort them by shoot time. That should present the images in a focal length progression. You can look at the metadata to double check this.

Answer These Questions:

• How do the longest and shortest focal lengths compare? Are the differences dramatic or subtle?
• At what point does the portrait look normal to you?
• Compare the eyes, ears, and nose in each image—how do they respond to each lens? (See Figure 4.8.)
• How does the story change between the shortest, medium and longest focal lengths? (Story, in this case, could be how attractive or comical someone looks.)