54 — Making the eyes sing — Photography podcast

Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast #54 talks about how to make the eyes sing in a pho­to­graph. When we take a photo of a per­son or some­thing that has eyes, we really need to pay atten­tion to what we are doing. The eyes are nor­mally the most impor­tant part of any por­trait and they need to be sharp and bright. Through a few basic tech­niques this pod­cast tells you what you need to do to get your subject’s eyes to ‘sing’.

Even in this medium range shot you can see sharp bright eyes

Even in this medium range shot you can see sharp bright eyes

The bulldogs eye sings because the iris is sharp and bright

The bulldog’s eye (stock) sings because the iris is sharp & bright

Links men­tioned in this pod­cast:
The eyes have it thread from the pho­tog­ra­phy forum
Acces­sories pod­cast (check image of the light stand hold­ing reflec­tor with magic arm)
A dodg­ing tech­nique for the eyes described in para­graph 2 of the post
Gary Fong dif­fuser at B&H
Pod­camp Mon­treal
CC Chap­man

Thanks as always to Benny and Susan who posted a blog com­ment about our last pod­cast and for her sug­ges­tion that inspired this pod­cast. Thanks also to Ram, Hallow’s maiden, Rabi­aka­ma­ran, Gatepc, BenH, MikeS, Dabow,‚ Inukamori, svant­land & PKMax who recently joined the photography.ca forum and posted a few times. We LOVE com­ments and sug­ges­tions so please send more.

If you are look­ing at this mate­r­ial on any other site except Photography.ca — Please hop on over to the Photography.ca blog and pod­cast and get this and other pho­tog­ra­phy info directly from the source. I Sub­scribe with iTunes I Sub­scribe via RSS feed I Sub­scribe with Google Reader I

You can down­load this pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast directly by click­ing the pre­ced­ing link or lis­ten to it almost imme­di­ately with the embed­ded player below.

Comments

  1. Kristofor Jensen says:

    So I’m going to get out my sil­ver sil­ver shirt because of this pod­cast! ;)

  2. JF says:

    Marko. Great pod­cast. I just lis­tened to it. Another sug­ges­tion for Susan — since she’s try­ing to pho­to­graph a mov­ing sub­ject and she has an excel­lent DSLR cam­era: instead of using man­ual focus (as sug­gested in the pod­cast and which can be very dif­fi­cult on a mov­ing sub­ject — hey I have 3 kids and I know how hard it is to keep them in focus!), you may con­sider AI focus or AI servo (which can help sig­nif­i­cantly with a mov­ing sub­ject) along with choos­ing one focus point (to be focused in the eyes) instead of the auto­matic focus points. Hope this helps. JF

  3. Hi Marko,
    I just wanted to say that I have been enjoy­ing your pod­cast a lot. I espe­cially enjoy your topic selec­tion. Keep up the great work!
    Leslie

  4. Susan says:

    Marko — Just fin­ished lis­ten­ing and am so very appre­cia­tive! The shut­ter speed! That never occurred to me. And, mak­ing sure the iris color shows, another sim­ple solu­tion that flew right over the top of my head. (I feel sorry for the per­son stand­ing behind me, lots of dodg­ing and duck­ing for them!!!) :0)
    Thank you so much!
    Susan

  5. Susan says:

    Marko!
    I just logged on and saw that you did this pod­cast — have not lis­tened to it yet, but am thrilled that you took the time to do it!!!! I will re-comment after I lis­ten to the podcast.…susan

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