Love —
Recently with fall colors in full sway, my fiancée and I set off for the Arboretum to capture some portraits of us together. My good friend Tony Scudiero, who’s now a fairly busy wedding photographer, has graciously offered to take some portraits for us, but for this particular photo excursion it was just Jenny and me.
Taking a photographic self-portrait (not involving a mirror) is an interesting exercise—setting up a tripod, fixing the focus, activating the camera’s timer, and rushing to get into position… I’m surprised by how well they turned out, considering… I do wish I had a wireless shutter release (would allow me time to smooth out my shirt, etc), but generally they worked out.
We ended up with several good candidates for a save-the-date idea Jenny had found on The Knot, and also several just all-around good pictures of us. I thought I’d post some up here.
I managed to use my 85mm to decent advantage for this shoot. To this point I hadn’t made tremendous use of the 85mm, but now I can see why 85mm is a favorite focal length for portrait/wedding photographers (and on my 30D it comes out about equivalent to 135mm, also another popular portrait prime lens). I’m fairly impressed by even this budget 85mm lens—while I don’t trust it wide-open, it turned out quite sharp clamped down slightly. However, I had to supervise my autofocus with this lens—it kept going somewhere (no clue where), and I needed to manually adjust to get the subjects (er— us!) in sharp focus.