How to Get the Eyes Sharp in a Portrait
A portrait can be beautifully lit, perfectly composed and completely ruined by one thing: the eyes aren’t sharp.
It is the first place anyone looks. Not the hair, not the hands, not that background you spent ten minutes clearing. The eyes. And if they are soft, the whole picture reads as a mistake even to somebody who could not tell you why.
Here is how to stop it happening.
Focus on the near eye. Always the near eye.
If your subject’s head is turned even slightly — and it usually is — one eye is closer to the camera than the other.
Put the focus point on that one. Not between them. Not on the bridge of the nose. Not on the cheek, hoping the rest will come along.
The reason is depth of field. At a portrait distance with a wide aperture, the sharp slice can be a couple of centimetres deep. The gap between somebody’s two eyes is easily more than that. Something has to be sharp and something has to be soft, and a sharp near eye with a soft far eye looks right. The other way round looks like an accident.
If your camera has eye detection, turn it on. It is one of the few features that genuinely earns its place, and it will hold an eye while somebody moves in a way you simply cannot do by hand.
Stop shooting everything wide open
The 50mm f/1.8 is most people’s first proper lens, and the temptation is to leave it at f/1.8 forever because the background melts so nicely.
The trouble is that at f/1.8, from a metre away, you have perhaps two or three centimetres of sharpness to play with. Your subject breathes. You sway. That is the shot gone.
f/2.8 to f/4 is the honest working range for a portrait. You still get a soft background, you still separate the subject, and you get enough depth to survive somebody being alive.
Save f/1.4 for when your subject is genuinely still and you are genuinely braced.
Catchlights, and why a portrait dies without them
A catchlight is the small reflection of your light source in the eye. It is the difference between eyes that look alive and eyes that look like buttons.
You do not need a studio. You need a light source with a shape, and your subject facing it:
- A window gives you a soft rectangle. The best free light in the country and it is in every house.
- An open doorway on a bright day does the same thing.
- A white wall opposite the light will bounce a second, gentler one in.
Get your subject to look slightly towards the light rather than straight at you, and watch the eye as they turn. You will see the catchlight arrive. That is your moment.
The one to avoid is overhead light — a ceiling bulb, or midday sun. It puts the catchlight up under the brow where nobody can see it, and drops the eyes into shadow at the same time.
Focal length matters more than you think
Stand close with a wide lens and you will stretch a face. Noses grow, ears shrink, and the person in the picture does not look like themselves.
Somewhere between 85mm and 135mm on full frame is the traditional portrait range, and it is traditional because it works. On a crop sensor, a 50mm gets you into the same territory.
The reason is distance, not the glass. A longer lens makes you stand further back, and standing further back is what flattens the features into something that looks like the person you know.
Getting closer than that
If you want the eye itself to fill the frame — lashes, iris, the lot — that is macro territory, and three things change.
Depth of field collapses to almost nothing. At life-size you are working with a millimetre or two. Stop down to f/8 or f/11 and forget everything above about wide apertures.
You will need more light, because you have just closed the aperture down.
And you have to ask. Being photographed at that distance is uncomfortable, and an eye is about as personal as a photograph gets. Say what you are doing, show them the back of the camera, and stop when they have had enough. It costs nothing and it is the difference between a portrait and an intrusion.
The five-second check
Before you move on from a setup:
- Focus point on the near eye.
- Aperture no wider than you can actually hold.
- A catchlight in at least one eye.
- Far enough back that the face isn’t stretched.
- Zoom in on the back of the screen and look. Not at the whole face — at the eyelashes. If those are crisp, you are fine.
That last one takes four seconds and it has saved me more shots than any piece of kit ever has.
Thanks for reading. If it was useful, come and say hello — I post the photographs that do not make it onto here, and I answer everything.
— Stephen
