Camera & Craft

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Chapter Four: Creative Control: Using Your Lens

Move the Background

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

Move the Background: Compression and Magnification

When you change focal lengths, another phenomenon occurs: With wider lenses, the background appears farther away from your subject, and with longer lenses it appears closer. Each focal length has a different magnification that changes the compression in your scene. If you photograph your subject in an area with a distinctive environment, you can easily see how the lens changes affect the background. For this exercise, you want to use different focal lengths to expand and contract the background in relation to your subject.

    Setup

    For this test, you’re going to create a full body portrait in an environment—preferably one with some visual depth. 2 You’ll be moving the camera when you change lenses and recomposing for each shot—while keeping your subject at the same size and position in the viewfinder (Figure 4.9).

    1. Start with your longest focal length. You’ll work your way to the shortest focal length. Frame up a full body shot.
    2. Set your camera to Manual mode and choose an aperture 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.
    4. Change to the next focal length and move forward. Compose a similar full body shot, keeping your subject’s position consistent. Take 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 does the background compare between the longest and shortest focal lengths? Are the differences dramatic or subtle?
    • Which image looks normal to you? Which one is the most interesting?
    • How does the story of the image change between the shortest, medium and longest focal lengths? (Story, in this case, could be how your subject relates to the background.)

    1 Doing this test and the Focal Length Portrait Comparison together is a good idea.

    2 Don’t photograph your subject in front of a wall, for example, because there’s not enough depth in that environment to see the effects of compression at work.