Find a location with good light for a portrait shot. Place your subject some distance in front of a simple background and select a wide aperture together with a moderately long focal length such as 100mm on a 35mm full – frame camera (about 65mm on a cropped – frame camera). Take a viewpoint about one and half metres from your subject, allowing you to compose a headshot comfortably within the frame. Focus on the eyes and take the shot.
For this exercise I roped my husband in to help be my model. I placed him in front of our patio doors in our front room as this had the most light within the house. I placed my 75-300mm lens on my camera and positioned myself approximately one and half metres away from him. I did try and the portrait on a 100mm focal length as you can see from my first two pictures but found this was too close so then tried with 80mm and 75mm focal lengths.
Heather Wade OCA Blog 