One of our members over at The Photowalk Alliance was in the market for a new lens to do some portrait work. Fellow TPA Co-Founder, Joe Sterne mentioned that she should be careful about lens distortion, especially if she was using specific camera sensors, or had limited space. Come to find out, she was going to be shooting in a very tight space, and had considered using a wide angle lens to do her work.
I wanted to throw something together quickly just to show the differences between wide angle lenses and the "nifty fifty" when used on both a full frame sensor (Canon 5D mkii) and a crop sensor (Canon 7D). All shots are OOC, and taken from about three feet away. The 50mm lens is the Canon "Nifty Fifty" and the wide angle lens is the Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6 EX DC HSM Lens. It's also important to note that the 50mm is a EF lens, and the Sigma is their equivalent to a EF-S Canon lens. That's the reason behind the black circle on the 5D photos.
One of the bigger mysteries that I've encountered on my journey through photography has been the exclusive club that belongs to the strobists. Flash photography has always, to me, been whatever happens when I put my 580EX II on top of my camera, point it at the sky, and hope for the best. But that's the fascinating thing about flash photography: it's so much more than just on-camera flash.
Today I decided to play around with some of the equipment that I've picked up over the past year or so, and post the results in a small blog here. Today's "toy" was an off-camera flash mounted behind a 24" umbrella sitting camera left. For those of you that can't figure that one out, what it basically means is that I had the flash off of the camera (triggered remotely) behind a 24" white umbrella. This allows the light to be softly defused and spread out a lot more easily over the subject. The light was then placed to the right of the camera. I did this for a couple of reasons: My subject was lit from camera left, and I wanted to light his better looking side with the flash.
From there, it was all a matter of camera setup. For most of these shots, I shot around f/4.5, kept my shutter speed a bit low and my flash stepped down 1/4. This kept the photos from blowing out from the flash. I also exposed on the window that you can see in the background, especially seeing as how my subject was so dark. The rest of the small shoot will follow at the end. If you have any questions, or want to know more about settings, setup, or anything else, feel free to comment below