Welcome to my May blog post!

The focal length you use for a photograph has a dramatic effect on the style of the finished result. For taking photos of people, or portraits, photographers often choose anything from 50mm up to 200m in focal length. For family lifetsyle sessions I use my Sony 85mm lens which for me gives the perfect setup for a nicely proportioned family shot.

Recently I have been experimenting more with wide angle portraits, using my Tamron 17-28mm ultra wide angle lens. Portrait photographers tend to not use wide angle lenses because of the distortion they produce, leading to unflattering shots of the subject. However there are many creative ways to integrate wide angle focal lengths into your portraits and family shoots by trying some different compositions.

Here I used a narrow depth of field and close distance to the subject to produce a ‘jumping out’ effect with the front of the left shoe, as it comes out of focus. The wide focal length accentuates the shoes, bringing more focus to them as the subject of the image. And finished it off with some layered colour masking to make the red bows pop, against the rest of the black & white image.

Lifestyle photography is all about capturing natural moments we find ourselves in, so in this respect a wide angle lens is great as it allows to include more of a person’s surroundings. This can provide more context to the situation and creates a story as to what is happening at the point of pressing the shutter.

Below I framed my daughter reading some books on Hove beach, in Sussex. I really love this shot! I took it close to the ground in order to show things from her perspective/level - this is a common way to photograph children. I also framed the sun behind in order to get some nice halo light around her hair. The wide angle allowed me to also get the clouds in, which I think gives a lovely serene backdrop - fitting nicely into how we usually associate with reading books.

After taking a few shots of my daughter, I was looking for inspiration and found a nice shell with a small hole. Using a very narrow f22 aperture, you can create nice sunbursts. This is because the light from the sun struggles to make it’s way through the very small camera lens opening, creating a sunburst affect where the suns rays form nice symmetrical lines. In this shot I framed the sun with the small shell, so the sun is peaking through nicely.

We always think of landscape shots as vast areas of nature that we capture in a photo, but it can be just as nice to focus on the smaller things.

One thing I love about prime lenses, or lenses with limited zoom, is that it forces you to use your camera in different situations. Leaving the house with just a wide angle lens I may be expecting to just take classic landscape shots. But by being more creative and trying something new, you can get some interesting results you weren’t expecting!