Portrait of Lydia in Infrared

Today’s Post by Mark Toal

I have photographed Lydia several times over the years. We’ve always worked well together so when she became pregnant we naturally started planing a photo shoot. Because of my travel schedule we ended up waiting until five days before the baby was born. For the shoot, I took both my Panasonic Lumix GX8 and Infrared converted Lumix GX7.

I almost always shoot Infrared with the 7-14mm wide angle lens but it can distort too much when shooting people so for this portrait of Lydia I used the Leica 25mm f/1.4 lens. I shot in Aperture Priority (Av) mode at f/2.8 because I wanted almost more to be in focus. I chose the 25mm lens for its angle of view and lack of distortion rather than it’s fast f/1.4 aperture.

Here are the Infrared and color versions of the same scene. I like them both, but prefer the Infrared for it’s beautiful skin tones.