Amazing Eyes

I'm huge on eyes. Both male and female. I make note of them all the time.

One of the first thing I noticed about my future wife when I met her is her big beautiful brown eyes (and her lips; sorry Angelina Jolie, you've got NOTHING on my wife!) 

When I'm out in public, and I see someone with incredible eyes, I have to fight back the "creepy photographer" urge to walk up to them, introduce myself, and just blurt out "I want you to come into my studio so I can shoot you and your eyes"...

My son's teacher for grade 1 & 6 (her name is "Dee" - same teacher for both grades) has incredible eyes. After my son moved to other schools (higher grades), my wife and I kept in touch with her. Just recently, I was fortunate enough to have her into the studio to capture her eyes.

As you can see below, Dee has beautiful unique eyes!

ISO 100, f/13, 1/100 second, 60mm focal length

You'll notice with the caption on this picture that it was shot at f/13. A very wide depth of field. I specifically shot this at a small apature (wide DOF) to ensure that I captured everything in focus. I wanted to use Photoshop's Tilt-Shift blur (one of three new blur tools in CS6) to selectively draw the viewer to her eyes.

Yes, I could have done this with my 50mm f/1.8 prime lens - set wide open @ f/1.8. But this isn't an L lens, and I have issues with it not nailing the focus at this kind of range. Plus, then I'd have to figure out some sort of continuous or natural lighting arrangement, and this wasn't in the cards for the Saturday afternoon that I was shooting Dee. I'd love the Canon 50mm f/1.2 L someday; but today is not "someday"! I can work with what I've got - no problem!

I've recently started working with a makeup artist. This has improved my final product - and reduced my post processing time - incredibly! She's able to take care of specular highlights getting blown out due to normal oil on the skin. This has improved the ratio of good to bad pictures which pass my filter and get shown to the customer.

You can see the results of all of this coming together in the above picture of AMAZING eyes!

Do you notice people eyes?