
Caption: African American Girls
Technical Data
Photo taken with a tripod mounted Nikon SLR film camera and Nikkor 85mm f1.8 lens using existing daylight. Approximate exposure 1/125 second at f11 - Fuji Sensia 100 transparency film. No lens filters were used.
Film was scanned using a Minolta Dimage series film scanner. Photo file was routinely optimized using Photoshop; levels and curves, color balance, sharpening, cropping and dust spot removal using clone tool. I use a Mac for all photo processing.
Comments
This photo was made on a sunny day at mid-day; perhaps the worst conditions for photographing people because of the harsh facial shadows. I tried the usual cure for this, fill-flash, but after a few frames I realized I wasn't keeping up. The girls were so animated and spontaneous that even the one-quarter or one-half second flash "recycle" (recharge) time was taking too long. I was missing the boat.
I quickly moved the girls into bright shade on the north side of a building where I could make pictures faster without waiting for the flash to recharge between shots. I made a few good pictures before the spell was finally broken.
I use short telephoto lenses with people because I like to get very close and personal with my subjects. And I want my pictures tightly cropped. But this style of photography makes for fairly high magnification, shallow depth of field shots. This means that the apparent zone of sharp focus is short (the distance behind and in front of the point I focus on, that appears sharp, is quite small). Because you gain depth of field with smaller apertures I stopped down to f11 for this picture and kept all the eyes and faces in focus.

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