Natural Light Portraits with the Tamron SP 35mm F1.4 for Canon

As we finished on the bridge, I thought we were going to be done for the shoot, but then I remembered walking past some really vibrant yellow flowers on our way up to the bridge. I wasn’t super thrilled with how muted the purple tones were from the first set of flower field images, so I wanted to do one last scene in the yellow flowers to have a more colorful set of images from this shoot. So, I used the same technique here shooting through the yellow flowers to create some vibrancy and interest in the foreground. In this scene, I was standing elevated up on the sidewalk and had more of a downward angle where I could photograph Violet in the field and not see the distractions of the rest of the park in the background. Again, I wanted her to look like she was engulfed in a field of yellow.

I shot this entire sequence of images wide open at 1.4 because I wanted to use the background as a secondary element in each scene. I wanted Violet to pop off the background and have the background compliment the scene, using trees and paths and flowers to frame the shots. Even with the bridge sequence, I wanted the bridge to compliment the shot, not distract from my actual subject. Shooting wide open at 1.4 allows your subject to pop in focus while the rest of the scene falls off and goes blurry– that is how to achieve a shallow depth of field. When I had Violet leaning right up against the bridge posts, both elements were on a similar focal plane, so my depth of field isn’t as shallow as some of the shots with her in the field or on the path. The more distance you create between your two elements, the stronger the blur will appear in the background.