Outdoor Portraits: Summer Is Ending Soon

Updated: The Canon 7D will arrive at my door tomorrow! more about it soon

Every year when Fall arrives, I step outside the studio and shoot outdoor. I just love the colours, the mood and the melancholy of the season. I find it so very soothing.

The light is also perfect when rain clouds roll through the sky and it is on such a day that I grabbed the Canon Rebel XSi, my 70-200mm f4L IS (my favorite portrait lens) and asked my friend Mari to help me create some nice pictures. I've always thought that the 70-200mm f4L would be suited for such occasions but by the end of the day, I changed my mind.

One thing about a long telephoto is that you can shoot through objects like leafs and branches and they will fall out of focus without blocking the subject. In this picture, Mari seems like she's inside a dense forest.

(click on the pictures for a bigger version)



This one is a misframed shot that I didn't plan for but rather like. The point of view seems to be from some predator stalking our model in the forest.



And lastly, a regular "show the clothes" shot that you would expect from a magazine spread



All in all, it was a great day. The only downside was throughout the shoot, the 70-200mm f4L struggled big time. All of the shots were taken at ISO 400 at the maximum f4 aperture and my shutter speed hovered between 1/60 - 1/125 in wooded areas. Ok, that's not too bad, the 70-200mm has image stabilization and at 70mm, it should be able to resolve images sharply, right?

Wrong. To get the blurred background at f4, the lens must be racked out around the 150mm range or preferably more. It's also a very long and heavy lens and even with IS on, most of my shots were slightly out of focus due to camera shakes. As a compromise, I shot most of my pictures at slightly less than 100m and blurred the background in Photoshop.

So next time, I think I'll bring my 50mm 1.4 instead and on a cropped-sensor like on the 7D, it should prove to be a good portrait lens. And if I win the lottery, I can buy the 70-200mm f2.8L IS. For now, the 70-200m f4 remains my favorite lens for studio sessions where most the shots are taken at f5.6-f8.0.