In this tutorial from Adorama TV, David Bergman is faced with a predicament. Walking through the park with a model, David decided to capture the nice scenery but by only using prime 85mm lens and wide open aperture.
The problem, however, is the fact that you cannot frame much of scenery around the model in the shot with 85mm lens. It’s just too narrow for that. Of course, you can step back at shoot from the distance. However, that blur effect from shallow depth of field will disappear since your model is too far from the camera.
If you were to have a medium format camera that can with shallow focus length and wider view, there wouldn’t be any issues to complete the task. But what if you only have your regular DSLR?
To create a digital image exhibiting a shallow depth of field in tandem with a wide angle of view, you don’t need a medium format camera. In fact, Ryan Brenizer used to mimic a medium format camera to create this type of image called “Bokeh panorama”, subsequently named as Brenizer method.
To create it, a photographer will shoot on manual exposure and manual focus multiple overlapping photos of much wider area of the same scenery by turning his camera quickly from one section of the desired frame to the next one.
Make sure that your model stays still during this process to keep her sharp in focus all the time.
After you got all section-images of the frame captured, use stitching software like Photoshop’s PhotoMerge to create a final, wide angle, medium format looking photo.
Watch the full episode with David Bergman and Adorama TV: