Close-Up or Wide Location Portraits - Take and Make Great Photography with Gavin Hoey

Gavin Hoey

Gavin Hoey is a freelance photographer, writer and trainer of all things photographic. His work is regularly featured in photography magazines, websites and videos.
Gavin has a real passion for sharing his photography and Photoshop knowledge. In 2008 he started recording and uploading video tutorials to YouTube. These quickly gained a large following and to date his videos have been viewed over 20 million times.
In 2010 Gavin was the winner of Adobe’s “Next Photoshop Evangelist” competition and since then he has given training demonstrations in Photoshop, Lightroom and Photoshop Elements in the UK, Europe and the US.
In 2012 Gavin joined forces with Adorama as a presenter on Adorama TV, where he inspires and teaches photographers from around the world in the art of photography and post processing.

A great location can bring a portrait shoot to life. It can tell a story, give your portrait context, or even jar uncomfortably with your models’ styling. The choice is yours and in this video, photographer Gavin Hoey will look at the basic question of… should you shoot on location with a wide lens or a telephoto lens?

For this shoot, Gavin takes us to a woodland location and works with a model styled with a fantasy princess look. Working with both a wide lens and a long lens, Gavin talks us through his thought process on the pros and cons of each. Along the way, you’ll see how Gavin uses a telephone lens to get a tighter crop, remove background distractions, and get a shallow depth of field. Then swapping to a wide-angle lens, Gavin re-shoots with the same model and location but this time gets images that have a greater sense of scale and make full use of the location.

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