Epic-Style Indoor Window Light Portrait BTS

BEHIND THE SCENES: Here, our subject is in a hotel ballroom in Venice, Italy. We rented a Carnival costume and mask, and shot with nothing but natural light, because the light in this second story ballroom was just beautiful.

CAMERA SETTINGS: The final image on the facing page is an environmental portrait where the setting is very important to the story you’re telling with your subject, so I’m using a very-wide-angle lens. This was shot with the widest full-frame lens they make—the Canon 11–14mm ultra-wide-angle lens—at 11mm. It’s. So. Wide! Because it’s a wide-angle lens, which tends to distort anything that’s not right in the middle of the frame, I tried to put our subject right in the middle. I want everything in focus from front to back, and I could have used an f-stop like f/11, which is made for stuff like that, but I’m hand-holding, so I don’t want to shoot at 4000 ISO. The good thing about super-wide-angle lenses is you don’t have to shoot at f/11 or f/16 to have everything in focus. You can shoot at more wide-open f-stops, and that’s what I did here. Even though I shot this at f/4, everything is in focus from front to back. Even at f/4, I had to raise my ISO to 1250 to be able to get to 1/125 of a second for a sharp hand-held shot, but take a look at the shot—you don’t really see any noise.