My Technique

When I decided to produce a collection of faces it seemed natural for me to shoot at f2 or f2.8. I have always enjoyed the out of focus parts of a photograph as much as the sharply focused areas. Deciding to use a 300mm lens was not my first thought. These lens are big and heavy. Not the type of lens to use for unobtrusive photography. I tried a 135mm f2, but found that to fill the frame with the subject’s face I had to be in their face, so I decided to try a 300mm f2.8. With this lens I was able to fill the frame at about 3-4m.

I started taking these pictures in February 2006. The light was often very dull, so a high ISO was needed to have images free from camera shake. Even with an Image Stabilisation lens, shooting at f2.8 I had to use 1600 ISO quite often to be able to handhold the lens without any movement.

Processing the images.

All images have been taken in RAW format, using Adobe 1998 colour space.

Read into Photoshop CS2 using Camera Raw and output to Photoshop in 16bit and upsized to the maximum size in Camera RAW.

In Photoshop I use Noise Ninja to reduce the noise.

First sharpening using Photokit Sharpener plugin by PixelGenius set to capture sharpen.

Any tone adjustments are made.

Convert to black and white using Convert to B&W 3 Pro plugin by TheImagingFactory, adding a tone.

Resizing the image using Genuine Fractals 4.01 plugin.

Second sharpening using Photokit sharpening brush 3 Medium edge

Third sharpening using Photokit output sharpening filter.

Convert the 16bit image to 8bit.

Saving the image in jpg for this site.

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