Club night summary – 24th January

Ant tells us more how his Brenizer workshop came about:

We recently held a practical workshop evening at the Club where I was asked to demonstrate the Brenizer method.  This didn’t just happen by accident, following a short talk at the club where I shared my experiences of learning this technique (it’s still very new to me too), a number of members have asked me to talk a little more about it.  Last night we had that chance.  But being a practical evening, I had no intention of talking ‘at’ my fellow members, I wanted them to bring their cameras & laptops along and give it a go for themselves.  There’s no better way to learn than to do, right?  Don’t worry, I won’t write war and peace on the ‘how to’ here, but if you would like to know a little more about it, why don’t you pop along to a club night where I’ll happily talk to you about it in more detail over a pint?

During my demonstration, we limited the number of images that we were going to shoot & stitch as it was important that we are all able to walk before we try to run.  We shot a number 3 and 4 shot ‘vertoramas’, and maybe next time when everyone has practised a little more (myself included), we can try some more complicated 9 and 12 shot ‘spirals’.

Once we’d all had a go at learning the appropriate camera settings, and shooting the right sequence of images, we got the laptops out and started to stitch our images together in Lightroom & Capture One.  What was great about this session, was being able to demonstrate in ‘real life’, how the Brenizer method affects our images, and why it affects them the way that it does.

Personally, I like to use shallow depth of field in my portraiture, but using a long focal length often means that I will lose some of that depth of field when shooting half body or 3/4 length portraits.  This method allows me to shoot much closer to my subject, whilst throwing more of the scene out of focus.  This might be especially useful for those that do not have lenses with very wide apertures.  In the image on this page, you can see the very obvious characteristics that this method creates in portraiture…sharp eyes with the focus ‘dropping off’ almost immediately due to the very shallow depth of field!