Down By The River

Sorry I haven't been posting to the blog lately.  I've been doing some private shoots for clients, but mostly I'm creating photosets to sell on Bentbox.  Yesterday, I did a private shoot for a client who needed some tame, but sexy photos for social media marketing.   There is a river about a mile from my house that can be pretty photogenic at certain times of year.   Yesterday was one of those uniformly cloudy, but fairly bright days that we get in May and June. 

The soft light is almost perfect for portraits, but you have to remember that the sun is still up there in a specific location.  It's important to keep your subject looking toward the sun to get even lighting on the face, even if it takes you a minute to figure out where the sun is.

These shots were all taken with my usual Canon 5D Mark 4 using a Tamron 85mm F/1.8 lens at F/2 to blur the background.  I liked that lens so much that I bought its little brother, the Tamron 45mm F/1.8.

I really like the way these two Tamron lenses render the background, while the subject is extremely sharp.  It's almost a 3D effect.   I call that subject/background separation and it's something you can do with expensive, large aperture lenses that you can't do as well with consumer grade lenses.  These Tamrons are also stabilized for sharper hand held shooting which helps with that subject/background separation, in my opinion.

Collecting lenses is fun, but my collection of lenses for my Canon EF mount cameras is pretty much complete and I haven't purchased one in many months.  Canon recently created a new lens mount for their new line of mirrorless cameras.  I suppose in a few years my current lenses will be obsolete.  So until I switch to a mirrorless camera, I think my lens collecting days are about over.  We shall see.

Thanks for reading!