ModelMayhem. Strobist. KEH.com. Brenizer method Archives - Ryan Brenizer -- NYC Wedding Photographer. Problem solver, storyteller. » Ryan Brenizer — NYC Wedding Photographer. Problem solver, storyteller. Time flies. It was almost four years ago that I started playing around with panoramas not for the traditional reasons of super-wide frames or insanely high resolution, but to dance my way around a simple problem of physics: to get incredibly shallow depth-of-field, generally you need a lens with a long focal length set to a fast aperture, but that restricts you to a narrow frame of view. You could shoot medium or large format film as one way around this problem, but physics gives us another problem: there’s a good reason you don’t see f/1.4 lenses for large format cameras. They’d be ginormous. But using panorama techniques effectively increases the size of any camera’s sensor, allowing us to use super-fast and relatively compact SLR lenses to achieve incredibly shallow depth-of-field even on wide-angle frames.
I loved the look I was getting and set out to see what I could do with it. The judges: Vancouver’s Nordica Photography and Brisbane’s Feather and Stone (and me.) The Rewards. Set up your Nikon for high-speed sync. Using flash in daylight is great for adding punch to your portraits – it fills in the shadows around the features and adds catchlights to the eyes. But fill flash can force you to compromise on your exposure settings. Normally, you can’t use shutter speeds that are faster than the flash sync speed – typically 1/200 or 1/250 sec.
That means you can’t use the widest aperture on your lens, so the background ends up being more in focus than you’d like. But some Nikons have a feature called Auto FP that enables you to use any shutter speed. Also known as high-speed sync flash, Auto FP makes your flashgun work differently. How to set up your camera for high-speed sync 01 Defy the limitations By default, your Nikon DSLR only lets you use shutter speeds up to the flash sync speed (1/200 sec or 1/250 sec). 02 Choose from the menu On models such as the Nikon D90, you go to the ‘Bracketing/flash’ options in the Custom Settings menu and turn Auto FP on.