Wednesday 22 July 2009

Auckland North Regional Team Training - Portraits

After spending hours on Saturday working on my latest project which involves a collection of portrait images my head was in "portrait" mode. So, when I went along to the Auckland North training I spent much of the time trying to capture some nice portraits. You be the judge...



Most of the time the light was flat but occasionally a thin strip of bright light would stream through the narrow windows along the west side of the gym. At these times I tried hard to capture people with their faces in the light. A tall ask when the strip of bright light was only 18" wide! With spot metering turned on I managed to get about three really graphic images in this light with this being the most "creative".


Lens: 300mm, 1/1000s, f/5.6, ISO: 1250

I took a lot of shots of John Matsuoka and some others but the low light level (and required slow shutter speed) meant that a lot of them were blurred. I was using my 70-300 telephone lens which is image stabalised and gives some stunning, results but is slow (f4.5-5.6). A lot of the images were soft due to the subject's movement. I was amused at how much some people move when they're instructing - others instructing often ended up just being a smeared image as they spoke, moved their head and arms during the exposure. I had better luck with my 85mm f/1.8 prime lens but had to get in much closer and these guys aren't that used to me yet so they get all self conscious.

I was really pleased with this photo of John. I took tons, like several hundred, to end up with this one:

Lens: 85mm, 1/320s, f/2.2, ISO: 800

While the lighting was a challenge I quite like the Auckland Grammar gym due to the simple raw grey concrete background on many of the walls which makes the activities stand out and reduces clutter in the images.