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C A N O N E O S 7 0 D : F R O M S N A P S H O T S T O G R E AT S H O T S
In the previous chapter, you learned about the different shooting modes, and that when
photographing people you’re likely to be most successful using Aperture Priority (Av) mode.
With portraits, we usually like to see a nice, soft, out-of-focus background, and you can
only guarantee that you’ll achieve those results if you have control of the aperture setting
(Figure 4.1). You’ll also be letting more light into your camera, which means that your ISO
can be set lower, giving your image less noise and more detail.
Now, don’t think that you have to use a crazy-fast lens (such as f/1.2 or f/2.8) to achieve
great results and get a blurry background. Often an f-stop of 4.0 or 5.6 will be sufficient,
and you might even find that having an extremely wide-open aperture gives you too little
depth of field for a portrait, since you want most of the face to be in focus. In fact, I shoot
many of my portrait photographs with a lens that has a maximum aperture of f/4, and I
always achieve the results I’m looking for.
Figure 4.1
For this image, I used
a large aperture com-
bined with a long
lens to decrease the
depth of field and
make the back-
ground blurry.
ISO 100 • 1/50 sec. •
f/4 • 70–200mm lens
