I started attending photography classes with a successful photographer and there's couple of things I was apparently doing very, very wrong. I do not want to question the photographer knowledge, but more so just to ask for "2nd opinion".
1.Studio portraits should only be taken with aperture of 5.6 or higher.
Is this true and does the same apply for outdoor portraits? Most of my outdoor portraits were taken with aperture 1.4 to 2.8, mostly because of less than optimal lighting conditions and I just love this beautiful bokeh.
- I am apparently supposed to use viewfinder only and not camera screen to frame the pictures, with both eyes open to see the model. Also taping the screen to correct the focus is a no-no.
I was usually only using the screen since I lack the mobility (really bad knees injuries), so I preferred moving the camera around instead of my entire body to frame the pictures, having eye contact with the model is also easier this way for me. The focus on camera is also often not perfect and being able to quickly "correct it" by telling camera where to focus is very, very useful.
- Using tons of lights and equipment to get desired results. The photographer that leads the lectures is very fixated on complicating the scene by using multiple of expensive lights and giant reflectors.
Personally I don't own a ton of equipment, so I always look a ways to achieve things without resorting to that many lights and reflectors and usually I can find people being able to achieve those results with two or even one light, simply by adjusting the angle, distance or power of the light.
I absolutely understand that more equipment offers more possibilities, but I just feel like it's sometimes unnecessarily complicated by some photographers.
- Having a large team of assistants. Last lesson we were split us into groups and had role assigned to each of us. Two people responsible for lights, director, photographer and so on. According to our teacher and the way he teaches us, having group of assistants is necessary or at least highly advised.
As someone who only ever worked alone (excluding the models of course) and plans to work alone in foreseeable future, I am not sure what to think of that.
- DSLR are better because they are more stable due to their heavier weight, compared to lighter mirrorless cameras. Also apparently information displayed on mirrorless cameras is lagging behind compared to DSLR, but I am not exactly sure what he was talking about.
A couple points.
Lenses are typically sharpest a few stops down from wide open so shooting at 5.6 makes sense in that regard, but if you want a narrower depth of field than what 5.6 provides you gotta go wider (also some photographers use extremely narrow depth of field as a crutch so it can be a good thing to shoot at narrower apertures for variety and to expand your style. You are also more likely to miss focus and not realize it until later shooting totally wide open). It's up to you as the photographer to make the picture you want, there are no ruless that say you can't shoot portraits with only the eye in focus or whatever.
Using the viewfinder is a more stable position than using the back screen because your arms are tucked in tight to your body. This will minimize camera shake and help you get sharper pictures, especially if you are shooting at longer focal lengths and are limited by a slow flash sync speed. If you are using a 135mm lens and are limited to 1/125 second sync speed you are probably going to get some noticable blur from the camera shaking if you hold your camera out away from your body and use the back screen. This is much less of a problem if you are using a 50mm lens, could be somewhat of a problem at 85mm depending on how strong your arms are, etc.
Tapping the back screen to set focus may or may not be precise enough to nail your focal point, depending on the camera, especially if you are shooting wide open. Using eye or face autofocus, or setting a focus point is typically more precise.