I went through a bit of a fisheye lens phase last year, using mine to photograph everything from historical buildings to cows, but the one sort of photograph I never managed to get to work with the fisheye lens was a portrait. The distortion of a fisheye lens, while it may do funky things to buildings and allow for different perspectives on the world, doesn’t really do much for the human form – if it had its way it would photograph people so that they had small heads, small feet and big torsos, which is not exactly a good look. So I haven’t had much success in getting a decent photograph of a person using this lens. Until now.
Well actually, until about 2 months ago, which is when this photograph was taken. The subject is Gary, who was the DJ at Shay and Sinead’s wedding. More importantly, he is a good friend of Shay and I’ve met him on more than a few occasions over the years through Shay. The official photographer had left Dunmore House, where the wedding reception was being held, earlier in the evening and so I had switched into “unofficial photographer” mode (as I tend to do at weddings where I’m a guest) to capture some of the later parts of the day, and I reckoned a photograph of Gary doing his thing would be a good thing to get, and something Shay (and Gary, hopefully) might appreciate.
The problem was that Gary wasn’t particularly keen to be photographed. Actually, that’s probably over-stating it. Had he obviously not wanted me to photograph him I wouldn’t have had. He wasn’t looking like he would pose, but to be honest I didn’t want him to pose. I just wanted to photograph him DJing. But I still was getting the impression he was conscious of my presence in the way that being conscious can make someone look a bit awkward in a photo.
The fisheye lens provided me with some cover to get around this. Because it has a 180 degree field of view (corner to corner) it’s a great lens for taking a photo of someone without being too obvious about it. While looking as if I was taking a photo of the dancefloor, I was able to tie down focus and exposure for this shot without pointing the camera directly at Gary and then at the last second just swing around a little to my left so that he was in the centre of the frame as I clicked the shutter. A bit deceitful perhaps, but it allowed me get a natural, rather than an awkward, photo of him. And putting him in the centre of the frame would minimize that distortion that plagues fisheye photos of people. It’s still there, in that his feet have a “small, far away” look going on, but I think it’s acceptable.
One issue that you can encounter with the fisheye lens in low light is how you throw enough light from your flash to light the entire frame. If you use flash pointing straight ahead from the camera it will throw a very distinctive circle of light in the centre of the frame that will not look good. A better option, which I used here, is to bounce the flash off something – in this case the wall just behind me – making it a much bigger light source, throwing light across more of the frame.
What this doesn’t help with is lighting things evenly as they get further from the camera (and so the light source), so I also used a high ISO and slow shutter to ensure that the background exposure wasn’t too far from what the subject exposure would be. That avoided the black backgrounds that often plague dancefloor shots if you don’t know how to deal with it.
A nice side effect of using a high ISO was that it meant the flash wouldn’t have to do a lot of work to bring the subject exposure up to the required level, and so I didn’t blind Gary with the flash. And when you have a subject who isn’t mad keen on being photographed so much so that you’re trying to photograph him without being too obvious about it, not blinding him is a good strategy.
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