War of 1812 Ceremony

When doing photographic coverage of events, it is important to do some closeup portraits of people involved in the event. I always look for participants with interesting faces.

I was covering a ceremony in Ontario that was commemorating the War of 1812.  I didn’t have to look far to find interesting faces. A number of people involved in the ceremony were in 1812 military uniforms. This fellow’s face in particular caught my eye.

In the changing light with people moving from sun to shade and back again, I had my camera set to aperture priority mode. This gave me the flexibility to shoot in sun or shade without having to take time to change my exposure. When I was shooting mostly in the shade the ISO was set to 800 to give me a fast shutter speed if my subjects happened to be moving.

When I found this gentleman, I moved in close enough to meter just his skin (without the meter being fooled by the dark uniform or the background) and made that the basis of my exposure. Then I backed up and recomposed to include his bayonet and some of the faces of the participants standing near him. An aperture of f/8 gave me enough depth of field to keep most of his face in focus but throw the other faces out of focus. This helped his face stand out from the others.

Photo Data: Canon 5D, Canon EF 24-105mm at 105mm, f/8, 1/250 sec, ISO 800.