Alice Willow / 5D MkII / 70-200mm f/2.8 IS
When I'm not messing around with infrared photography, old medium format cameras, or odd latex fetish photography I can turn my hand to ordinary, honest-to-goodness portraits in the Victorian style. Normal photography, viz the above, of the lovely Alice Willow, who looks a bit like Natalie Portman and has the kind of jawline that even David Bowie circa 1975 would have killed for. If you have the money, and you look wonderful, and you live in the South of England, and I'm not busy, I can do this to you.
HOW I DID IT:
I, er, pointed the camera and you know. If you're a photographer yourself you know how I did it.
For the rest of you, the magic ingredient was a bit of fill-flash, using an el-cheapo Yongnuo YN-560, which is completely manual and can throw out a lot of light, or in this case a tiny amount, because I only wanted to light up Alice's face. Manual exposure, 1/200, f/3.5. The trick with fill-flash is to find a combination of manual settings that expose the background correctly (or a little bit dark), and then bring up the flash to fill in the subject. With the constraint that you can't use a shutter speed faster than the camera's sync speed, which in this case is 1/200th. That can be a problem if you want to shoot at f/1.2 in bright sunlight. So don't do that! Goodbye!
