Shallow Depth of Field Studio Portraits

Shallow depth of field portraits look amazing but getting a good shot with flash is more tricky then you might think. Using flash technology like High Speed Sync (HSS) makes shooting wide open, whilst overpowering the ambient light, simple. In this video Gavin Hoey takes a more low tech approach and shows you how to shoot manual flash, in a bright home studio and still get portraits with amazing blurred backgrounds.

Related Products at Adorama:

Olympus OMD E-M5 Mark ii

Olympus M. Zuiko Digital ED 25mm f/1.2 PRO lens

Sekonic L-308S Flashmate
Flashpoint StreakLight 360 Ws Creative Collection

Glow ParaPop 28″ R Softbox 

Flashpoint Zoom Li-on Manual On-Camera Flash

Glow ParaPop 38″ Portable Softbox

Photos by Gavin Hoey

Transcript

Gavin Hoey:

In this video, I show you how you can get a shallow depth of field using flash in a small home studio.

Hello, I’m Gavin Hoey and you’re watching AdoramaTV, brought to you by Adorama, the camera store that’s got everything for us photographers, including a great range of lenses.

And today I’m using the Olympus 25mm f/1.2 lens. Now, that means I can shoot amazing shallow depth of field portraits right here in my small home studio.

Now, I’m gonna use flash to light the portraits because I like the control it gives me. However, this flash system, well, it doesn’t support high speed sync for my camera. And you’ll often find [that these] camera and flash combinations don’t have high speed sync.

But, you can still shoot at wide open apertures with a bit of planning.

Now, the planning starts with my camera settings. I’m in manual mode, fairly obviously. And then, I’m going to go for an aperture of f/1.2, extremely obviously. The smaller the number, the smaller the depth of field.

Now, I need to reduce the amount of ambient light that the camera sees, so that means using an ISO as low as it will go—100 in my case—and then a shutter speed as fast as I can. That’s going to be something called the flash sync speed—check out the Adorama Learning Center for more information about that.

And it’s 250th of a second on my camera, except the Olympus E-M5 Mark II secretly will actually shoot at 320th as a flash sync speed, even though it’s not in the manual. That’s what I’m gonna dial in.

All of the rest of the pictures will have those exact settings.

Right. Let’s get a model in, [and] let’s get shooting.

Once again, I’ve been joined in the studio by Beth, who’s going to be the model for this shoot, and you’ll notice that we’re missing something to begin with. We’ve got no lights here whatsoever, because the most important thing by far if you’re using flash is that you overpower the ambient.

And shooting wide open with a fast lens like this, that’s quite a challenging thing to do. So, let’s just take a shot with the ambient light and see what we get.

Okay, Beth. Here we go.

Now remember, I’m shooting at the same settings as if I were shooting with flash. Ideally, this should be a black image, but it’s clearly not, and that’s because the f/1.2 aperture is sucking in so much of the ambient light, it’s contaminating the image and I’m losing control of the lighting in this shot.

So, first of all, check how much light contamination you’ve got. And the best thing to do is to shoot in a darkened room—not completely dark because of course your camera has to focus, but you might find you need to turn some of the lights down now.

Obviously, if we turn the lights down, you’re not going to be able to see much of the video from now on. So the pictures you’ll see will be with the lights turned down—but we’ll keep shooting with the lights on.

So, for my first light, I’ve just got a small softbox, the Glow softbox. And a small light source, just a speedlight.

Now, the combination of a speed light, which produces a fair amount of light, and a softbox which will soften and reduce the amount of light, could be perfect to hit the f/1.2 aperture of this lens.

Let’s find out.

Now of course this is down at its lowest possible setting, 1/128th of its full power. If I just take a meter reading from underneath Beth’s chin, I’m actually getting f/1.3, which is actually close enough. This will only do 1/3 stops and my f/1.2 is half a stop, so with that combination that’s absolutely perfect. And I can shoot away wide open f/1.2.

Let’s take a shot. Here we go.

And, it works brilliantly!

So, there’s a simple solution: use a speedlight and a small softbox.

This time I’ve changed to my favorite light, my Streaklight 360. And I’ve got it in a slightly bigger Glow softbox as well. However, the Streaklight 360 is enormously powerful compared to a standard speedlight, even right down at low 1/128th power, it’s probably going to be too bright. But let’s meter it and find out.

So if I get my flash meter, I’m going to pop it underneath Beth’s chin, I’m getting f/2. Now that’s as low as this goes, I cannot get that light any lower in power.

Now, there are a few things I could do: f/2 is, well it’s way over a stop overexposed from f/1.2 that I’ll be shooting at. But let’s have a little look and see whether it does look overexposed.

Here we go, Beth.

Yeah, it does. It’s definitely overexposed. However, I’m shooting in RAW, so in theory I could actually pull this back a little bit in RAW. It’s not really an ideal solution, but it is a solution.

So, what can I do about that? Well, there’s a few things I could do. One of them is fairly simple: move the light further away. The further away I move the light, the further the light travels and the lower the intensity of the light becomes.

So, I just moved it back about a meter or so. Let’s just take a test meter reading there—f/1.3
That’s close enough to my f/1.2 so that should give me the correct exposure. Let’s take a test shot and see how that goes.

Here we go.

Yeah, lovely. That works really well. So by moving the light back, I get the correct exposure and I can continue to shoot at f/1.2. However, there are some problems when you do that.

When you move the light further away, it’s going to become a smaller light source relative to the size of the model. Therefore it’s a little bit harder. Not too much of a problem here, but also it changes the light that hits the background, thanks to the inverse square law.

Now, you can find out more about the inverse square law by checking out the Adorama Learning Center.

And in this case, it’s throwing perhaps too much light onto the background than I might want. So, is there another solution? Yes, there is. Think about this. If you went out on a really sunny day, you’d probably wear sunglasses. Well, we can actually give our cameras a pair of sunglasses, although I suppose technically it would be a monocle because it’s just one lens.

This is a polarizing filter or a neutral density filter. If I put this in front of my camera, it’s going to reduce the amount of lights that the camera sees. Now, that’s great because our flash is producing too much light. We can reduce it and get our target aperture by adding this to the combination. That means I can actually get minus flash and move it much closer to my preferred position back here.

It also means that when I meter the light, I have to meter through the neutral density or the polarizing filter.

So what I need to do is to put the polarizing or neutral density filter over the light meter’s dome and then test that, and it’s going to read the lights that [are] passing through the filter. And I’m back to f/1.1. In fact that’s even a little bit too dark. I can add just a tiny bit more light and get back to my f/1.2-1.3.

So that’s great, that works really well. All I need to do is remember to add this in front of the lens.

Okay, let’s try this. Here we go, Beth.

And that looks really good. The polarizing filter or neutral density filter means I can shoot away quite happily and get great results wide open.

Now, the really good news is, this cuts down all light. It’ll cut down the flash but it’ll also cut down the room ambient light as well. So if you are struggling to get the ambient contamination down, this is also a great solution.

So, I’m going to put these into practice by setting up a nice little shoot here, and we’ll get some great shots.

Okay, you ready?

Beth:

Yep!

Gavin:

Alright. Let’s do it.

[Various resulting images are shown]

Shooting shallow depth-of-field portraits in a small home studio does throw up a few technical challenges, but the results are well worth it, and you open up a whole new world of photographic possibilities.

In a future video, I’ll give you some tips and tricks [on] how to maximize the shallow depth-of-field look. And of course if you want to see that and the other amazing presenters right here on AdoramaTV, you’ve got to click on the Subscribe button.

If you’ve enjoyed this video, please leave a comment below.

I’m Gavin Hoey, thanks for watching.