For Project Brief 2, I have change a bit of the photographing style from street portrait to street fashion photography in taking inspiration from the Korean photographer Hongje Ahn. Ahn is a fashion photographer who mostly posts his photo on Instagram. In Ahn’s photograph, he usually use a plain background with the subject standing in the middle. With a shallow depth of field and plain background the subject stands out in the picture. In most of his photograph, he asks the subject to put a cool pose and look straight into the camera to give a strong sense of fashion.

Ahn also photographs some close-up shots where he focuses on the models’ eyes and shows the detail and contour of the face.

Technical procedure

Equipment

Camera: Canon 5D Mark II & Canon 5D Mark III

Lens: EF 50mm f/1.8 STM Lens for close-up shots & EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM Lens for full body shot

Shuttle Speed

1/125 sec or faster, for street portrait I want to freeze the subject as fast as I can. Anything lower than 1/125 sec may have the result of getting blurred shots while the subject is hard to keep still.

ISO

ISO 100-400, as it is on the street there is enough light to come in, so I set the ISO at a lower ISO number.

Aperture

f/2.8-f/4, I want to use a shallow depth-of-field to focus on the eyes and across the contours of the face without including too much distracting background. Hence, I set the aperture around f/2.8 to f/4.

Composition

I put my subject in the middle of the frame and asked them to look straight into the camera and here are some of the testing shots:

Close-up shots

Full body shots