A Good Picture is Where You Stand

I've been taking more portraits lately and climbing that long uphill learning curve.

One of the first things that you discover is the many opinions about the right gear to use. In particular, there is much discussion around the best lenses for shooting portraits. The most common opinions favour lenses with a focal length of around 77mm - 135mm. The reason for this is usually stated as being that this range most accurately represents facial features without distortion.

I was deep into an article on why the author preferred as much as a 200mm lens for portraits, with demonstrations of the same shot with various lens, from 30mm to 200mm, when I read a comment under the article, from a professional portrait guy, who said that distortion in lenses was a bit of an illusion (actually, he didn't say that, I did, but stick with me for a second) and that the perspective from any lens was the same depending on one thing: how far you stood from your subject.

This immediately brought to mind a quote attributed to Ansel Adams (and the title of this little article); A good picture is where you stand.

I found the idea intriguing, and to be honest, somewhat shocking. I certainly got Adams' quote context when shooting landscapes (and probably it was what he was referring to) but it had somehow never occurred to me that the same might apply for portraits. And I also felt a bit of positive reinforcement, as I had been quite happily shooting portraits with a 31mm lens. So I decided to check it out.

The differences here are remarkably subtle. The bottom shot was done with the 31mm lens at f1.8 from about 4' away and cropped in to match the top shot, also taken from 4' away (the same spot), but with a zoom lens set to 73mm and at it's fastest f stop of f4.5. We would sort of be picking nits here in looking at the very small differences; they are remarkably similar, and I suspect for a great deal of shooting they would be almost indistinguishable from each other.

So, interesting results, yes? The funny thing is, without knowing it, I had been using exactly that technique. Two examples below;

Pentax K1, 31mm Limited lens, ISO400, f1.8, 1/100s

Pentax K1, 31mm Limited lens, ISO400, f2.2, 1/60s

Both of these portraits, as noted, are with my 31mm lens, and as I mentioned at the start, not the norm for portraits by any means. In fact, wider angle lenses like this are often used as examples of how they distort features. I hope you agree that the features aren't distorted. And the reason for that, I now understand, is where I stood. On the first shot I was about 10' from the bride and her parents, and the finished shot was cropped to about half it's full area, so it ended with the 'look' of something very close to a 75mm lens (or maybe a clearer way to say it is, this is the shot a 75mm lens would have taken from where I was standing).

On the second shot I was maybe 7' away. The shot is tightly cropped from the original, which was a full length shot of the bride. Without getting into complicated math, I suspect that this shot is about what a 135mm lens would have taken from where I was standing. And as we discovered in our little test above, a lot of the things portrait photographers prefer about their 135mm lens - proportion and perspective and the like - are mostly duplicated here in this cropped shot. Cool.

Am I losing some quality by cropping? Sure, I must be. But the 8" x 10" prints of the second shot are quite stunning, and any 'more' quality would be really hard to notice. The full frame Pentax certainly helps, and I don't think I need to try to get beyond stunning just yet as I work at learning how to take good portraits.

(But it has made me think; the lovely and extraordinarily highly rated 77mm Pentax Limited lens goes to f1.8 and wouldn't that be nice. But that's for another day :)).

Onward and upward.