Narrow Depth of Field Portrait

 

I love big catchlights and narrow depth of field.   The lighting set up is illustrated below

It was a five light set up with two strip boxes in front, a shoot-through umbrella off to the right and two bare head monolights illuminating the backdrop.

I shoot in my home and it has relatively low clearance, less than 10 feet with white paint, thankfully non-gloss.  When the strobes go off, particularly off a blown out white background, the light ricochets around the room and spills over into the image.  It’s imperative to control this.  So recently, I’ve added two more backdrops to the studio.  I put black muslin and use these to keep the light from bouncing off the walls.  I also drape a third black muslin sheet over the top of the three backdrops to black out the ceiling.  I’m still working on making the backdrops stable, but the results work pretty well.

This was shot with an 85mm f/1.4 Zeiss lens on an APS-C sensor.  The subject was 1.2m from the camera meaning that this shot had 10mm depth of field. It took quite a few shots to get the eyes in sharp focus.   With a few more tries, I could have gotten a bit sharper, but this was pretty good for a test shot.