A Scenic World

You may have heard that lenses in the 70mm range are best for portraits because the longer focal lengths compress features like noses while shorter focal lengths tend to exaggerate them. With my self-portrait project, I take quite a few arm’s length portraits, and unfortunately none of my long lenses will focus within that range, so I very frequently use focal lengths like 31mm and 43mm for my self-portraits. I see this rule in effect all the time: the wrong angle with the FA 31mm will make my forehead look huge, or my cheek, or my chin (I’m not even going to consider my nose for now). You really learn how important angles are with taking portraits when you work with these lenses at such close distances.

But what I hadn’t realized explicitly was how this works with macros as well. I had taken a pretty cute picture of the dogs sleeping the other day, so for my self-portrait I wanted to do a shot of me with my finger pressed to my lips in the universal “Sssssh” sign. I pulled out my flash and the DA 35mm Macro lens, took a test shot or two, and took the shots I thought I wanted.

Except, upon viewing them later on the computer screen, I could see that they were NOT what I wanted – unless I wanted my finger to look ridiculously stumpy and fat (which it kind of is, but not THIS bad).

See for yourself:

Scary, isn’t it? I ended up going with one of my test shots instead, taken with the same lens but from a good deal further back:

Per request, I have re-installed the download for my “Texture Heaven” Lightroom preset. I used this preset originally for the following image; I find it works best for non-portraits, but a warmer version (which I also included for download) does more justice to skin tones.

Original inspiration for “Texture Heaven”:

Either way, you can grab the downloads from my Lightroom presets page, or by clicking below:

“Texture Heaven”

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“Texture Heaven Warm”

Sorry for the negligence I’ve shown to this blog in the past month; December was a whirlwind of road-trips and outings, and January started out just as busy. But things have slowed now, so hopefully I’ll pick up the slack here.

Some things you have to look forward to, based on my own experiments this past month:

• Infrared cameras vs. visual light
• How to process infrared photos in Lightroom
• Studio shots of highly-reflective subjects when you don’t have a studio
• Faking tilt-shift without any software at all
• The problems of using wide-angle for close-ups
• How I got a very stubborn dust-spot off my camera without ruining my sensor

I’m going to get started on at least one of those right now, and as always, I’m open to suggestions for anything else you’d like me to write about.