In this first shot I wanted to get the tulips in the background to give me some colour, but I wanted them out of focus so that your eye is instantly drawn towards the subject, my daughter. Using my 85mm f/1.2 lens I could have completely opened up the aperture (f/1.2) to really blur the background (see my aperture tutorial for more info on how this works) but since I was fairly close to her I knew that if I did that very little of my daughter would be in focus as well. I therefore decided to stop down to f/3.5 since in my experience with that lens it gives me a suitable amount of depth of field, while still producing a very pleasing bokeh (blurred background). With my subject standing in open shade there was still a decent amount of light available so that I used ISO 100 to give me the cleanest photo with no grain, while still giving me fast enough shutter speeds. With aperture and ISO settings selected I metered the background to give me a correct exposure shutter speed value of 1/320th sec. To provide a bit more contrast in the subject's face I also setup an off camera flash in high-speed sync mode to the my left, which was in the same direction of the indirect sunlight. To match the colour of the setting sun and warm up the colour of the flash I covered it with a 3/4 CTO gel, and set my camera's white balance to 4600K to keep some of the warm orange tones. Other than converting the camera output from RAW to jpg, this shot is basically straight out of the camera with no added post processing.
Camera: Canon 5D mkII
Aperture: f/3.5
Exposure: 1/320
Focal Length: 85mm
Flash: Fired off camera
ISO: 100
Post processing included conversion from RAW
The second shot has a somewhat similar setup. I needed more depth of field since there are three people in the shot, so I stopped down to f/5.0 giving me a very sharp focus for all the girls, yet still slightly blurring the background. The sun in this shot was coming in from behind the subjects giving a very nice rim lighting, so I needed to expose for the background (shutter speed of 1/320 @ 100 ISO) and use my flash to bring the girls back from becoming silhouettes. The flash was setup on my right, and I again used a 3/4 CTO gel to match the golden sunset colour and high-speed sync. White balance was again set to 4600K to keep some of those warm tones. Other than converting the camera output from RAW to jpg, this shot is also basically straight out of the camera with no added post processing.
Camera: Canon 5D mkII
Aperture: f/5.0
Exposure: 1/320
Focal Length: 85mm
Flash: Fired off camera
ISO: 100
Post processing included conversion from RAW