Something New, Something Old

I heard Vincent Versace say something in The Candid Frame podcast (highly recommended) the other day that I really liked. I forget who he was quoting, but he asked, "What's the fastest thing in the universe?" Of course the answer is, "Light." He replied, "It's funny then, that darkness always gets there first."

I think about this all the time, and now I have some language for it.

Nikon D7000, 70-200mm f/2.8 VRII lens @ 175mm, f/2.8, 1/1600s, ISO 400.

In this image I got to try something new--a positioning of the lights that I've never tried before. I know other people have used this method, but It was new to me, and it was fun. At least, it was fun for me, and I think A. didn't mind staying after class a few minutes to experiment with me. I'm always trying to get students in front of the camera. I think it's only fair that photographers be in front of the lens--kind of an application of the Golden Rule, I guess.

Light position was the new thing. Lens choice was the old thing. See, I got a new lens a while ago, the latest version of the dreamy 70-200mm f/2.8 VRII lens. It's pretty sweet. But, shortly after I got it I had to send it in to Nikon for some tweaking. In the interim I started using my 28-300mm f/3.5-5.6 VR lens in it's place, and it's a great lens. Very sharp, and it focuses as close as 1.5 feet, so that's nice, too. However, it's an f/5.6 lens, which means it doesn't yield as shallow a depth of field in a portrait. That means more of the picture is in focus, whereas that 70-200mm gives a very thin slice of the world in focus, and that's pretty fun to do. So, I've been using lots of strobes and high powered lights and making family pictures with plenty of depth of field. For this portrait I got back to the wide open aperture, shallow DOF, dimmer light method that I started with a few years ago.

It's good to try new things, and it's refreshing to realize that the old things still work, too.

Give me a call--I'd like to try some new things with you.