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Who ever said a shoe shot had to be a close-up? This is one of my favourite shoe shots.

This type of photo is particularly difficult to execute. Shot using a tilt-shift lens, external flash, and movment (of the shoes), this photo combines three elements of photography that are difficult to shoot even on their own.

What does a tilt-shift lens do?

Well, let's start with a normal lens. When you focus on something, normally, things in the foreground and things in the background are blurry. In other words, the blur is front and back (the plane of focus is parellel with the image sensor of the camera).

But with a tilt-shift lens, you can alter the plane of focus. This means that you can make things go blurry side to side, up and down, or even on an angle. This is how I got the focus to go right down the middle of the image - Antonia is sharp, and her shoes are sharp, but the further you look to the sides of the image, the blurrier they get.

While I'm making sure that the focus is perfect (it's a manual focus lens), Jaime (from Blueprint Events) is holding an external flash with a RadioPopper for me. It's broad daylight, but I feel that adding some extra light adds a certain mood to the photo and also brings the viewer's attention to the shoes a lot faster. This is what is illuminating the top part of the image and casting a shadow of the door. The door would be a lot harder to see without the light too.

And then there's the movement. So you can imagine that when you have a very narrow line of focus and you are shining a light in a particular spot, you have to track the movement of your subject really well, or, the subject has to move in a very specific way. Enter Antonia.

Toni… how many times did you have to throw your shoes in the air? And how scuffed were they after they landed on the pavement every time you threw them?

All in all, it took about 20 minutes to get this shot. Good thing we had a lot of time for the photo session!