Cool jobs portrait: Poinsettia botanist

This time of year is personal projects season. One theme I'm working with lately is "cool jobs". It's fun to highlight people who do cool stuff for a living. They are typically pretty stoked about their job which translates to a good portrait of them.

One of my subjects is a woman named Ruth Kobayashi who is the head botanist for Ecke Ranches in Encinitas, CA. Ecke Ranch is a huge producer of Poinsettia flowers in the US and around the world. Her job is to tweak and manipulate the flowers to generate specific colors and leaf shapes. Kind of like playing god.

Here are a couple of portraits from the shoot.

 

 

In this third portrait, I discovered something that I knew but never experienced in this application. I used a 45 tilt shift lens for this shot and racked the tilt all the way over. Adjusting the tilt on a lens can create greater or less depth of field depending on how you adjust it. Greater DOF could be beneficial in an architectural situation where a maximum DOF is required but a larger f stop has to be used. The tilt can be used to decrease the DOF for create effect. This effect is fairly popular these days for miniaturizing scenes.

But there is an odd side effect of cranking the tilt all the way over to achieve a shallow depth of field. I'll explain it briefly, but if you really want an in-depth explanation, follow this link.

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/focusing-ts.shtml

By tilting the lens, you are essentially tilting the plane of focus. Instead of having a plane of focus that is parallel to the film(or sensor) plane, tilting of the lens shifts that plane of focus exponentially away from the film plane. Like I said, read the article above and it will make a lot more sense.

Either way, the effect in a photo like the one below is that objects both near and far can be in focus, yet everything around them is not. Ruth's eyes are in sharp focus but the hairs right above her forehead are out of focus. Then if you look lower in the photo, her arms are way out of focus, yet the table that is five feet behind her is tack sharp. I didn't really notice this while I was shooting but once it was up on the monitor, I found it really distracting. My eye keeps drawing down to the clutter on the table instead of to the bright flowers on the table. Had I noticed this while I was shooting, I could have manipulated the lens to get her eyes and the front row of flowers in focus. Next time.

With some practice, this technique could create some cool results. It could be used to get two subjects, on behind the other, both in focus while dropping everything else out of focus. I'm stoked to play with this more and see what effects I can get from it.

Enjoy the weekend!