BLOG
Travel Log London Belgium & Paris
Experiencing London, Belgium, and Paris with the Samyang AF 85mm F1.4 EF
I’m a portrait and fashion photographer by trade, and I often use a telephoto lens to create flattering photos of people. When I’m not shooting for work I love making documentary street portraits, especially while travelling. For a recent trip spanning eleven days across three countries, I brought the Samyang AF 85mm F1.4 EF lens with me, using it for a variety of scenarios.
The AF 85mm F1.4 EFshines as a telephoto portrait lens.
In street photography, there are times when you wish to isolate your subject in the frame for greater emphasis. The F1.4 aperture in the 85mm makes this easy with the shallow depth of field, with nice blurring of the out-of-focus areas - commonly known as bokeh. The wide-open aperture also helps to keep my ISO setting low at 100 or 50 ISO, keeping my images clean with minimal noise.
I love how smooth the transitions are from the sharp areas to the out-of-focus ones. Check out the softness of the bokeh in the background compared to the sharp subject, creating a nice cinematic quality to the images.
Additionally, the softness from the depth of field was desirable in creating the mood of soft morning sunshine.
A portrait’s strength lies in the subject’s expressions. Especially more so when you capture an unguarded moment from someone unaware of the camera.
Most often a wide-angle lens is used for scenery or landscape shots. With the AF 85mm F1.4 EF, I took a different approach by using the telephoto length for an added close-up and intimate feel. A telephoto lens will also further compress the foreground and background together, so objects further away look closer to camera than they actually are.
This series of images has an overall contemplative and quiet theme to it, which reflected my state of mind at that point in time. They were captured the exact moment I felt embodied the mood I was seeking.
All in all, as a photographer, the photos I take represent how I want the world to perceive the way in which I view things, and having the right equipment makes it a lot easier.
RELATED PRODUCT
.jpg)