Cramped Hands, Cramped Quarters

If you're tired of seeing Krista on the couch, I promise that this will be the last one in a long time. Cramped hands: By the time I took this photo, my right hand was cramping badly. I rented a heavy 70-200mm lens the morning before and took save-the-date/engagement photos for my friends (posts on the shoot coming soon). Then I ran around for several hours taking photos of Melia. By the time I started taking headshots of Krista, my hand was a wreck. Having carpal tunnel syndrome stinks. Cramped quarters: Krista was most comfortable, and therefore looked the best, on the couch. Unfortunately the distance from the couch to the opposite wall was only about 10 feet. Confined to this short distance, Krista also wanted shots of her head with her upper torso, so I had to keep the zoom lens close to it's widest focal length of 70mm (105mm on my small sensor DSLR). As a consequence, even at the lens's widest aperture of f/2.8, too much of the background (the dining room and kitchen) was in focus. If I had more space, say 15-20 feet instead of 10, I could have backed up 5-10 feet more, and set the lens to 150-200mm (225-300mm on my camera). At those focal lengths, the background would have appeared very blurry, instead of being just in focus enough to be a distraction. Looking back, what I could have done was increase the power of my flash, so that I could keep Krista properly lit, yet let the background stay dark (because the flash was not powerful enough to light the background). That way, even if the background was in focus, it would have been very dark relative to Krista, and therefore it would not have been a big distraction.