A family member asked me to make a business portrait for him; he’s organising a conference next year, and needed a picture for use in the prospectus and related documents for the event. This is something a little different from what I usually shoot, but I was happy to oblige. Below is a low-resolution version of the final image.
The light is early evening sunlight, nicely diffused through a layer of cloud and reflected off some nearby walls. I’m pleased at how well the lighting worked, actually. I brought a flash to experiment with, but after a few trial frames, it was clear that relying solely on natural sunlight was the better option on this occasion. I was using my usual kit—a Nikon D700 and Nikkor 85 mm f/1.4 prime lens. Once I was happy with my settings, I shot several frames. The final image above was at f/2.8 with ISO 3200, yielding a very long 1/20 s exposure duration. Subject distance was only a few metres, so depth of field was quite shallow. You can see that the subject’s shoulders and ears are out of focus, and even the knot in the tie is slightly out of focus.
Everyone is pushed for time and energy these days (myself included), so the location was chosen by convenience. That’s actually an external stucco wall in the background (only a metre or so behind the subject), and I’d been hoping to retain some texture in the final image, but the depth of field was just too shallow. I would have preferred foliage in the background, but in this case the subject was happy enough with the setting.
With a bit of work up front to get everything looking as good as possible (primarily the subject’s clothing), there was relatively little post-processing work to do. If we’d had more time or other resources available, we could have prepared the clothing and the subject (and certainly the choice of background) better, but I’d consider the final image to be a reasonable result.