Initially, I was just going to post this image but decided to describe a little about how it came about instead as I thought it might be of interest.

Currently, I’m experimenting and photograhing with a Canon G9 this week in order to gather enough information and samples to use in a review, which I’ll post after this weekend. One of the fun parts of using the camera has been challenging myslef to see what I’ve been able to produce in the area of portraits – an area which is one of the greatest weaknesses of compact cameras.

The issue with using a compact camera to take portraits is typically threefold:

- Poor performance at high ISO (compared to DSLR’s), meaning available light has to be very good
- Lack of good choices of flash
- Smaller sensor resulting in little or no shallow depth of field. It’s a generalisation, but wide apertures / shallow depth of fields are typically much better than making everything sharp in portraiture

With 12 megapixels squeezed into a 1/1.7″ sensor, the G9 doesn’t break the mould for high ISO performance, but interestingly it does take a professional flash.

So, in an impromptu 5 minute shoot last night with Akuri (my wife and resident model), I mounted a Canon EX580 MKII flash. Side note – this setup creates a ridiculous looking piece of kit (I’ll definitely include a picture in my review). It was late at night and we weren’t in a studio so were working with the gear I just described, regular overhead tungsten lighting, a white wall as a background and another wall to bounce the flash off. With a little exposure adjustment, the camera / flash metered well and after a few shots, I felt I had a good portrait to work with for post processing (coverting to black and white, etc).

However, I like my portraits with a shallow depth of field and the 1/1.7″ sensor of the G9 can’t do anything about that. However, fortunately Photoshop can. Using the gradient tool and lens blur (similar to a technique I describe here), I was able to get an effect that looked similar to a natural lens bokeh / out of focus. It’s not perfect (if you study the different planes of focus you can probably see some discrepencies) but this was a 2 minute fix and I wanted something that looked good, not necessarily super realistic.

Anyway, the result? Actually very good I thought. I’ve taken countless numbers of peoples’ portraits with top of the range equipment and while this particular image is not groundbreaking, the fact that it can pass as something that I shot on high end gear is kinda cool. I am definitely very pleased with it. Perhaps more importantly, the final judge – the subject – was very happy too :).

For me, this is a picture I’ll look back on to remind myself of the well known adage that that while gear is important, it’s how you use it that really counts.

The image follows below. Click on it for a larger version.