Turns out what I wanted to say about shooting portraits was mostly already said this morning by my friend James Brandon over on his blog. He posted a great shot of his nephew from last Easter, and just like me, shot it with a fast 50mm…my go-to lens for any portraiture. The great thing about shooting with such a wide aperture is the ability to let the background just melt away into delicious bokeh. The drawback is that you need to make sure your focus is spot-on. If you miss focus by even just a few millimetres, you can end up with an out of focus subject and a ruined shot. My strategy is to use a single autofocus point on my Canon 50D. I almost exclusively use the centre point, partly out of habit and partly because it’s the most accurate AF point on the camera. I typically grab focus on my subject (almost always the eyes) and then recompose the shot to taste. I’m sure there are things I could do differently, but for now, this technique is what works best for me.

Oh, and in case you missed it yesterday, I had the honour of writing a post for Brian Matiash’s ‘Alt Perspective’ series. You can check it out here.