Description: Ryan Hurst from "The Walking Dead" and well known for his role on "Sons of Anarchy", taken in Los Angeles in 2018. Ryan was fun to shoot, he was constantly reacting non verbally during his panel interview, which although this isn't a dedicated portrait where I was working with him one on one, this was from a panel interview in front of an audience and thought it fit well with the expressions theme. Shooting with the Nikon D7500, the focus is not so great so I certainly had my work cut out for me balancing light and focus.
I try to look for something unique to shoot when shooting anything and the one thing that stood out to me were the expressions.
Gear used: Nikon D7500 with Nikkor 70-300mm f/4.5
Settings: ISO 5,000, 300mm, f/6.3, 1/200 sec (I was not as experienced with photography of people at the time because I was shooting a ton of architecture, unlike a lot of my peers, I was not afraid to jack up the ISO as I felt there was good enough tech to minimize the noise in post. This is the slowest shutterspeed I could go with and surprised I didn't get motion blur because Ryan was not moving a lot, but his face was. I was experimenting with my settings a bit to see the limits of the D7500 1/200 of a second I was really pushing it at 300mm as the base line for a camera without in body stabilization should be 2 X's the focal length minimum. I got lucky but not entirely, there is detectable motion blur in the facial hair near the mouth as his mouth was moving and his eyebrows)
Processing: Post processed in Lightrroom, but it was years in the waiting. Sure the tech was there back in 2018 but I really did not get to see this photo like this until the recent updates. I used masking to work on Ryan's hair, without adding texture to the skin and the new noise reduction feature of Lightroom is absolute fire. This new feature literally crushes any NR I have used previously in the past decade.