For those of you who don’t know much about photography – when you’re shooting wide open with certain lenses and focal lengths – the person you’re photographing just swaying a half inch backward or forward can throw off your focus. Furthermore, camera shake can also cause the images to appear soft or out of focus, thus being why I wanted to shoot with a tripod with a fast shutter speed. The combination of the two eliminates it as an issue. Plus, lenses sometimes can be a bit soft at the extremes of their aperture range. So, in theory, I was setting the camera up to perform at its best outside of not shooting in the sweet spot of the lens, which on this camera would be around F5.6 I’d guess.

Then I put Joe in front of it – and realized maybe I should have instead intentionally introduced some camera shake and thrown off the focus.

I kid. I kid.

I was really happy with what I got of him. I got several fun shots of him that I will likely also share soon – but not before I get with his blessing on it – but this one here was what I was aiming to for to begin with. The slight smile and the look in his eyes captured his personality pretty well I thought. Out of all the good stuff I got, this one stood out to me the most.

For those of you who don’t know Joe, he’s an Atlanta-based commercial photographer that I use to assist for. I’ve learned A LOT from this man, and at one point, putting in 15, 16, and 17 hour days on location shoots with him was not uncommon. One time I assisted for him on a job for 24 hours straight. Yeah. Good times! Anyway, he’s very talented, and an absolute wiz when it comes to lighting and rigging.

So, when I got over there to his studio and started setting up my lighting, I was surprised to find myself feeling intimidated – because I rarely do these days. Not on portraits as straight forward as I had in mind. Not for something like this. But, I found myself second guessing myself.

It turned out exactly as I had envisioned, though – with the exception of me not converting it black and white. I decided I liked the tones too much with the color in it. So, it stayed.

So, here you have portrait of a man that may very well have forgotten more about photography than I’ve ever learned: Joe “Gearhead” Boris captured with a Lumix LX100 at F2.8 at 1/500th of a second.