
Caption: Close up of young girl
Technical Data
Photo taken with a handheld Olympus SLR film camera and Zuiko 100mm f2 lens using existing light. Approximate exposure 1/125 second at f5.6 - Kodak T-Max 400 black & white film push processed a little. No lens filters were used.
Film was scanned using a Nikon Coolscan series film scanner. Photo file was routinely optimized using Photoshop; levels and curves, sharpening, cropping and dust spot removal using clone tool. I use a Mac for all photo processing.
Comments
This young girl was headed to the dentist later in the day so getting an authentic somber pose wasn't hard.
I wanted to emphasize her large chocolate eyes so I positioned the camera a little above her and used a lens that would focus close enough to eliminate the background. The fairly wide f5.6 aperture combined with the high magnification (I was at most eighteen inches from her nose) made the eyes snap and everything else blur out nicely.
Ordinarily I wouldn't recommend this technique. Handholding a camera with a heavy lens can be shaky and using apertures less than f8 for very tight portraits is tricky - there's very little depth of field. But sometimes you want just what breaking the rules will get you.

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