Ultra Wide Angle for Portrait.

Portrait. When we speaking of Portrait, the first picture painted in the mind is the Ultra-thin DOF with superb long telephoto lens 200mm with preferably f1.8 like the Canon Gigantic Behemoth EF200mm f1.8L USM! AWESOME background isolation and throw everything into melted cheese stimulating OOF. Yeah, I am a BOKEHLICIOUS guy of course! But for Portrait, especially for outdoor, I will always framing to include more and more elements into my shots to make my shots more and more interesting.

Actually as most of the photography genre, outstanding subject defines your Portrait shots as in your subject is properly stand out from the frame and catches eyes at the first glance. The easiest and yet effective way to stand out the subject from the shot is the BOKEH. But at the same time, it kills off creativity as all shots is the same frame or either 1/2 body shot with OOF background or full body with OOF. To me, it just sounds like another same framing with different subject only......

I am crazy for with bokehlicious set up, with my beloved gear of 5D mark I pairing with Bokehlicious EF 50mm f1.2L USM and superb ZEISS Planar 85f1.4 (contax/yashica). BUT my favourite portrait lens will always be my EF 17-40 f4L. Weird? Depending, really. The most important idealogy is framing with ELEMENT into the shots.

This is the my first UWA that starts to change my photograhy genre:



Some of my favourite ultra-wide angle Portrait:





Yeah, the subject is properly isolated. The objective is always, "how the subject is pop out". GREAT, the keyword is HOW. Of course, you can always throw your background into BOKEH and your subject will always stand out from the frame. Still, there are times where background is too busy and distracting. So, why not proper frame the background and gets you much better framing? Bear in mind, shooting with ultra-wide angle is much more difficult compared to ultra thin DOF lens.

In order to effectively isolate the subject from background, there are two important criteria to remember:

(1) Framing.

I love Portrait with ultra wide angle, 17mm on Full frame. But not distorted "big head" shot, those are for fun, not for serious work (I prefer more distorted Fish Eye). Shooting with ultra wide angle, things are more difficult as there are lots of DOF across the frame. The subject will be very loose, not outstanding in the picture. Therefore, proper distance between the background and subject is very important to avoid loose framing. With proper distance, the subject is much better isolated as following:



(2) Lighting

Lighting plays the most irreplaceable role in photography. Other than it creates the required exposure to the shots, the different exposure between the background and subject gives you proper isolation. This is extremely important and yet the most effective to pop your subject from the slightly underexposed background. You can achieve this by either flash or simply dodging in photoshop.



With the two very important elements, I believe shooting great Portrait with Ultra-Wide Ange should be easy for everyone. I love answer those question like: "What is your favourite Portrait len", as my answer will always be: "EF 17-40 f4L USM" apart from those BOKEHLICIOUS.