Impromptu Portraits

By André Costantini

There was just a moment or two. Well, maybe three. But I wanted to take a quick impromptu portrait. I knew the light was great, but there was not a lot of it. When I say that, I mean I could see it with my eye, but sometimes what I see, the camera can't quite capture. Have you ever had that experience? You see it and you know that it's there but when you try and take a picture, it falls a little short. There is nothing more frustrating then knowing that it's possible but not being able to make it. It doesn't matter what "that" is, but in this case, it was a picture.

It was my brother and I. We had a couple of days together for the first time in a long time and these days there is never enough time to be able to do everything we want to do. He came up for the weekend and we were working on a capital project (AKA rebuilding the side deck.) We came in for a break and he sat down at the table and I grabbed the camera. The light was coming from the sliding glass door in front of him. When he sat down I knew I just had to take it. So I asked him to stay there for a moment as I composed the image. I used the wider angle to incorporate the setting. As I took the first picture, I noticed the window in the background and then asked him to move closer to it. Though the light from the window added dimension to the image at the table, it was really bright when he sat in front of it. In the second picture, he was totally backlit because the light from the door which so nicely illuminated him in the first picture was barely enough to expose his face. In other words, I saw him, but the camera didn’t. It wanted to properly expose the curtain which would result in a really dark figure.

There were two things that I needed to be able to do to get it the way I saw it. The first was the exposure. With so much backlight (the bright window behind the subject), I needed to quickly trick the camera’s exposure. I had to overexpose the camera’s metering system, which gets confused by the brightness. I was using manual mode, so I over exposed what the camera’s meter said (if you are using Program or Aperture Priority use the EV Compensation and go to the + side one or two stops.) The second was using a slow shutter speed. The toughest part about using a slow shutter speed is being able to hand hold them for a non-blurry picture. Fortunately, the lens I was using had a stabilizer and in this case Tamron’s Vibration Compensation (VC) technology. It makes the difference between blurry and clear pictures (unless you always carry a tripod.)

Sometimes, life happens quickly. Both of these images were taken about 90 seconds apart. When I was faced with these challenging photographic circumstances, Vibration Compensation Technology saved the day. Be ready. Be prepared. Capture the moment (or two.)