You pick the portrait lens!

[Dans_D60]

I will be shooting a full day portrait session tomorrow and usually setup my garage studio in advance so I can concentrate on model placement and not backgrounds or lighting. I decided to take a few test shots and you can pick the lens.

OK no cheating by reading the EXIF file information.

Four shots four different lenses.
Lens choices:

• 50mm 1.4 (at 50mm)
• 28-70mm 2.8 L (at 50mm)
• 70-200 2.8 L (at 70mm)
• 100-400 4.5 L (at 100mm)

Setup is identical.

Setup:

Two strobes at 45 degrees one set to 400 W/S fill power and the other at -1 f-stop. Third strobe for hair light. Manual meter reading with handled Polaris II indicating f/13.5 on main and f11.8 on fill. 10D camera set to manual all shots f13 at 1/60 firing strobes with PocketWizard. Custom WB using white/gray background. Large JPEG (normally I shoot all RAW but wanted to do very little post processing with this lens project)

Workflow:

Copied images using Breeze Downloader Pro. In Photoshop I cropped all images to 640 X 510 pixels for display purposes. No color, contrast, or level correction. Unsharp Mask at 90%, 0.3 radius, 0.0 threshold.

Pick the lens:

IMAGE ONE
http://www.pettusphoto.com/compare/1.jpg

IMAGE TWO
http://www.pettusphoto.com/compare/2.jpg

IMAGE THREE
http://www.pettusphoto.com/compare/3.jpg

IMAGE FOUR
http://www.pettusphoto.com/compare/4.jpg


Dan
http://www.pettusphoto.com

[GPR1]

Wow. Hard Decision, at least on my laptop monitor -- not the best for critical decisions. Number 4 is your worst lens. 1, 2, & 3 are all good, but I pick #2 by a hair (literally -- I was looking at the hairs on the fur).

Good luck.

[MediaMagic]

If the only thing you changed were the lenses (and didn't move the tripod at all, just cropped). 1 and 2 have the identical perspective. Three (to a lesser degree) and four (to a larger degree) show distinct parallax which might be caused by the minute difference in nearness of the front element the larger focal lengths would create. So my guess would be:


1) 50mm 28-70
2) 50mm prime
3) 70mm 70-200
4) 100mm 100-400


Probably way off, huh? lol

This is cool and fun anyway!

[MiG82]

Did you crop or resize? I've never seen 100% crops like that. That's pretty amazing if those are just crops.

[dwbrant]

I like #3 the best (slightly better colors I think).

[Dans_D60]

It was fun! Answer your question about resizing. Yes I used the 100-400 (shot at 100) as the base shot and resized others to match.

And the lenses are:

Image one: 100-400
Image two: 70-200
Image three: 28-70
Image four: 50

Now today will be shooting “real” model portraitures and I’m setup and ready to go. My 10D has never failed to amaze me as to quality of these images. I’ll be enlarging many to 8X10 and some to 16X20 and past experience with this camera has shown these images will compare nicely to medium format. Back to the studio!

Dan
http://www.pettusphoto.com

[MediaMagic]

Dans_d60 wrote:
It was fun! Answer your question about resizing. Yes I used the 100-400 (shot at 100) as the base shot and resized others to match.

And the lenses are:

Image one: 100-400
Image two: 70-200
Image three: 28-70
Image four: 50


Dan
http://www.pettusphoto.com



Well, I got all those right! lol, oh well, obviously my theory of the parallax didn't help my guesses much! Looking forward to more of your shares, Dan, good luck with today's shoot!

David

[Dans_D60]

MediaMagic wrote:

... Dan, good luck with today's shoot!

David


Thanks David ... link to a few images from today's shoot ..

http://www.pettusphoto.com/kelly/Ch2

Dan

[robertwgross]

That was good, but now Minnie needs a break.

---Bob Gross---

[Dans_D60]

robertwgross wrote:
That was good, but now Minnie needs a break.

---Bob Gross---

Hi Bob:

Isn’t MINNIE a wonderful model? I use her for lighting placement and white balance checks all the time. But you’re right; better give her a break before MICKEY finds out!

Anyway, last Sunday’s session is complete and I have posted a few images from the shoot. http://www.pettusphoto.com/kelly/Ch2

And as usual, my 10D (and D60) performed beautifully. All shots are auto focus everything else on manual in the studio and “P” mode with some manual override for the outside shots. I took 486 images on Sunday and maybe 2-3 missed focused from the lot. Used every lens in the arsenal, even a Sigma 15-30 as an experiment for portrait work. All RAW and filled up 3 1G CF cards and 1 512M. Used Breeze Browser to sort and tag the images. Then C1 to process RAW. And PS 7 to crop and cut. I find C1 does a “slightly” better job with RAW conversions than Breeze or the PS 7 plug-in. But honestly it’s very small improvements if any at all. It’s just a workflow habit for me. All images are saved on dual mirrored external disk drives so I can safely format the CF cards when needed.

Wonderful hobby and every session is a learning experience.

Keep on shooting!

Dan
http://www.pettusphoto.com