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If one of your favourite hobbies is photography and you have grown a certain reputation among your friends you become a personal photographer of their kids and dogs. It´s like having a large estate car or van - you got a lot of transportation jobs. You wether like it or not. If not: Get yourself a small sports car and start to collect stamps. While I´m not a particular fan of these transportation jobs I usually like it to take images of people ( even if they are very young ) and dogs. I also would like to take more images of grown ups but while everybody loves to get proper images of their kids, dogs or whatever almost nobody likes to be photographed ( the writer of these lines included ). I think the problem is that everybody creates a special picture of her/himself and this picture doesn´t match reality. If photographed they look at the image and are somehow very dissapointed and usually quote something like "I know that I´m not photogenic." This effect gets even worse they more dissapointments they experience. Finally most of us put on a very strange "help me I´m being phorographed" face that ranges from pure fear, over distress to a completely stupid, forced grin. Well I do the same. I think that digital photography is a real improvement in this area because of the small DELETE button on the back of the camera. And you can try it virtually a hundred of times without loosing money. But usually the special face is still there and you are the poor guy on the other side of the camera that only wishes to trow the camera away and put a paint brush instead. Why the long story and what does it have to do with the image above? It´s simple. A couple of former customers which are no longer customers but became friends asked me to take images of them because the need it for their application. The company they worked for closed and the have to look for a new job. While I got the image of Micheala above after 9 shots! I was less lucky with the other two. I took a lot of shots ( well couple of hundreds actually ) to get a couple of nice images. But after this shot of Michaela I knew I had the perfect image. She really managed to look absolutely relaxed and very beautiful. There is a strong eye contact and an almost perfectly "neutral" face. I always prefer this over the classical "show us your teeth" - smile. Technical details: The sun was still up but already very low on this warm, late afternoon in October. I tried to find a place around their office to be able to shoot at natural light. Finally I found the perfect place: It was not hit by direct sunlit but the wall of their office bounced very soft light into this special corner. The background was a rusty, pale bluegreen wall and there was even a perfect catch light in the eyes. Very soft light, natural catch light and a very good background what else can you ask for? Maybe a little more light. I had to shoot at 400ASA to get short shutterspeeds but with the D200 this is not a problem at all: The image is still crisp and free of noise. Also skin tones are rendered awesome. While I took all my gear with me I shot almost every picture with my 2.8/90 Tamron Macro lens. This is a great lens and together with the D200 it is almost magical for portrait work. The image was slightly retouched regarding wrinkles and skin.
A-Mode: 1/200@f4, 400ASA, WB Auto -3, Portrait setting
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