It was a pretty cloudy day. The sun was shining only from time to time so I didn't get much of an effect I desired: tiny spotlights through the trees leaf. This effect together with an orange hue makes pictures look more warm and familiar. But one has to be careful: the spots might burn the image - an additional flash helps.
As always I used the on-camera flashlight (auto modus - ETTL) which this time helped me a lot because it was pretty dark under the leaf. Again the used f-number was a little to small (somewhere around f4) and I say too small because the model was usually close to the lens (1-1.5m, 3-5ft) so I think I should have use f6.3 or something.
Focal Length
Because of the distance, I had to use a ~30mm focal length (50mm on 35mm equivalent cameras) but this makes the pictures look unnatural. Pictures look natural at a focal length of about ~55mm (85 mm on 35mm equivalent cameras). I didn't find any explanation for this on the net but using this focal length kind of resizes the foreground and background of an image to make their relative size to each other similar to the way the human eye sees it.
Ok, don't even try to understand what I wrote, just grab your camera and do the following: ask someone to stand in front of your camera in the middle of your room. Now repeat these steps: 1. slowly zoom in while getting away from the person and then 2. slowly zoom out while getting near the person's face. While doing this try to move so that the face of the person never changes it's size on the viewfinder. Sweet... and now repeat the steps looking at the background. You'll see it somehow shrinks when you are at step 2 and vice versa.
Posts
