How to Photograph a Stranger

Hi, everybody. This is Craig Tanner for The Mindful Eye and the Photo of the Week on the Daily Critique. This week’s photo of the week was submitted by Usha who’s an intermediate photographer from Wisconsin and I want to say an apology to all the people who participated in our community assignment no.3 and the assignment was to photograph a stranger. Somebody that you didn’t know before, you approach them about taking their picture. We were supposed to post sort of our favorite image from that assignment as the photo of the week.

A couple of weeks ago, we’re on our Death Valley National Park workshop and we’re having a lot of trouble with our internet connection there so we had to put this off and so I just want to apologize that it took longer and I also want to say big thank you to all the people who participated in this assignment.

I want to get right into it today, we’ll talk about the back story and the metadata here. We should shot this image at a music venue where three bands were performing. She wanted to move up front and try and find to see where she could be close to the bands and as she was going up there, she saw this couple sitting close to the seat that she was going to take the photograph of the bands and she decided to approach this woman. She paid her a compliment. I’m going to talk more about that in a minute and ask her if she could take her picture and the woman was very much into it. I know she says that, not only did she go on to get this picture and some other picture. She thinks that she made a friend as if somebody that she will stay in touch with.

Usha shot this with a Canon 5D. She used a 50mm F14 lens and she also used some camera flash. I’ll talk more about that in just a second. Usha at ISO 3200 exposed to file at F25 for 1600 of a second. So let’s talk about a couple of technical things connected to the metadata that might be take away for you if you wanted to do this kind of photography.

One of the things I’ve mentioned here is the flash and I know she’s shooting hand held so one cool thing that flash can do for you in really low light is that it can let you shoot at lower shutter speeds and you might get away with otherwise. This is a 15mm lens and it’s pretty hard to handhold a 50 and get anything sharp but shutter speed’s much lower than around a 60th of a second.

The way she’s gone all the way down to a 60th little second, how can she do that here because the flash is the main source of illumination and the flash in this low light being the main light. The duration of the flash on camera flash, I’m just kind of guess here and say on average, it’s probably going to be somewhere around the thousand to the second or 150th of a second and if there is not that much ambient light and you hold the camera really still as the shutter is dragging what does that mean?

As the shutters stays open longer than the flash fires then the flash being your main light source can really help to freeze that part of the illumination on the subject, 1500th of a second duration on the flash is way fast enough for the 50mm lens to make that part of the exposure same sharp and so you can get a sharp edge to part to the portrait and you’re really seeing that here if you look close. You can really sort of see this and the idea of the lips right here, you get a sense of some sharper as in some speckle of highlights but then a little bit of a blur right here on the crease of the lips and you’re getting a sense of that up here in the eyes.

So I just wanted to mention that about five shot, I think the flash has done something out here, I go ahead and say that it’s gotten a beautiful catch light in the eyes. It made the eyes really come alive and that could be really important in any kind of situation including a low light situation like this where you might want might to photograph somebody just right there but they’re not in the greatest quality of light or maybe the light is so low, you can’t even shoot so love what the flash is doing here on a couple of different levels, anything I’m really enjoying from the technical standpoint is this particular lens.

I’m a big fan of fast 50mm lens for doing this kind of impromptu portraits. In this case, it’s Canon’s 50mm F14. Now I can also make some 50 F14; those are both great lenses. They are affordable lenses. The other thing I like about these lenses is that they are light weight and they are ingressive. Their smaller lenses have a low profile and that can work in you favor.

While fast shooting at shallow depth of field like Usha has done here at F25. I can really help you to simplify a background that you may not have of much control over you. You get this person to say yes but maybe you’re not able to get them to leave from where they are and go somewhere to take their picture. That’s certainly possible to ask them to pose somewhere but if we just want to shoot her sitting where she is, working a shallow depth of field here is just great.

There are so many other things that I really like about this portrait in addition to what the flash has done here and the shallow depth of field. I love how close Usha is. Another really neat thing about the 50mm lens is in a full sensor of camera is going to encourage you to get physically very close because to fill the frame with the face on a 50mm lens, you’re just going to be a couple of feet or so away but 50 is wide enough and it still gives you the opportunity to show some atmosphere and make more of a layer portrait and the other thing that I like about the 50 is even in this close, it tends to render the perspective on the different features of the face in a way that looks fairly close to the way we see.

If you came in this close, where the wider lens are semi-wide, you might start to really get some perspective distortions like the nose getting much bigger than the rest of the face and so on and so forth, 50 tends to do a pretty good job with that.

I love the orientation of the head on the face here in this shot but that I mean, we call this a three quarter pose where if we could see the ear here, we would see one ear and not see the other. It’s a dynamic orientation of the face and head because it ends up showing us the third dimension of the face, not just across and up and down but the side of the face.

And a lot of times this is dynamic. You do get one ear. You get one eye larger than the other and get one side of the face bigger than the other and it can tend to put some dynamic impact in the portrait.

Another thing that I love here is just how relax this person seems to be. Obviously, Usha has made a great connection here. This person’s looking right into the camera. This is an easy smile even the hand and the hair is showing something that’s very relaxed and I’m really enjoying that.

Something also that I like here, a sort of this idea of a portrait where it’s all about harmony of color. The fact that this was shooting in warm light here and then you’ve got one skin tone but a lot of the other highlights in here are warm and they harmonized with the skin, you don’t end up with the straight color that really sort of overwhelm as the portrait subject. What you really have is the eyes being essentially almost black and white in high contrast. They really pop out above and beyond everything else, everywhere you else you look there’s sort of a really beautiful harmony of color. So I’m really enjoying what’s happening with color in this portrait.

Few other things I don’t want to say here, at the end today, I want to say huge thank you to all the people who had the courage to do this assignment. I’ve been done sort of another myth who says they met their talent in photographing. I’ve been in a lot of street photography impromptu, photography of people and this is a big part of some of our workshops now; straight portraiture next up and I call the 9090 myth and the 9090 myth says that 90% of photographers are anywhere from sort of afraid to very afraid to do this kind of approach but the amazing thing is that about 90% of people will say yes and a large percentage of the ones that say yes will, you’ll have the experience unless you’ll end up becoming friends with a lot of these people and the 9090 myth is a very powerful story that were caught up and that’s keeping us from having a better life. It’s keeping us from having more community for ourselves and for our work. It’s separating us from something that’s just amazing. They surround us all the time.

If you can get out of the 9090 myth, if you can deal with it in a couple ways, if you can become 10% of photographers who deal with this fear and you go passed it and on the 10% of people that say no, you can, no.1 step away from them and just keep going and not carry that with you except to say, “I’ll see him again maybe and I’ll say yes.” No, no is just not yet and you’re able to have the mental discipline to do those two things then the whole world is going to open up to you that I think will truly be amazing and a couple of raw practical things that you can do, pay people a genuine compliment as part of what she did here.

She told this woman that, she thought that she had a beautiful face and when the compliments are genuine and you feel good about it and, the one thing that people that end up sort of becoming experts and successful and things that are one most powerful thing they all have in common. They have a lot of support for what they were doing so our people need support. I mean, we can give that at a genuine way, we make a powerful connection, slow down, slow way down. When you approach, go much slower than you would typically go and leave a space for the person to engage.

And the other thing is have a good time watching yourself doing something that may be new for the very first time instead just buying into how uncomfortable it is actually become conscious enough to be at the same time that you’re doing this reserve a part of your consciousness we’re just watching what’s happening and you’ll learn a lot more in the process, huge thank you to Usha and her beautiful portrait subject here for creating this beautiful portrait and sharing it with us in The Mindful Eye’s community assignment no.3 and also on the Photo of the Week on the Daily Critique.

Have a great weekend everybody.