The Brief

Find a location with good light for a portrait shot.  Place your subject some distance in. front of a simple background and select a wide aperture together with a moderately long focal length such as 100mm on a. 35mm full-frame camera (about 65mm on a cropped-frame camera).  Take a viewpoint about one and a half metres from your subject, allowing you to compose a headshot comfortably within the frame.  Focus on the eyes and take the shot.

My Image

Jayne

Reflection

I shot this photograph in overcast light against the backdrop of a large laurel hedge.  The focal length was 105mm and aperture f2.8 with an ISO of 400.  By getting Jayne to turn her head and look at the camera, only her ‘leading eye’ was in focus.  This is a fairly common practice in portraiture and in this case I wanted to get across how the depth of focus rolls off over a short distance.  The viewer’s eye is drawn into her gaze with the soft detail of her face completing the knowledge that we are looking at her face.  By the time we get past the hair and into the background, the main feature is the deep green of her coat and the background becoming just a texture.

I’ve not taken many portraits, but the ones I have shot have benefitted from reducing the number of distractions in the frame.  Large apertures and flattering focal lengths (anything over 50mm) help focus on the detail and reduce any lens distortion.