I was lucky enough to meet one of my favourite graphic novel authors, the great Chester Brown (author of much praised Louis Riel) at the Word on the Street festival. He is a very nice man, and was kind enough to give me a fully illustrated autograph!

I love the canon 50mm f1.8 lens; although very cheap, it produces great pictures. perfect for portraits.

update: to answer a few questions;

- yes, the portrait has been desaturated and colour corrected to match the colour palette of Chester Brown’s work as an homage.
- I had only a few seconds to take this shot, after asking “is it ok to take your photograph?” so I didn’t have much choice for asking a pose. but I like it as it is.
- the shallow depth of field is the result of the open aperture of the lens and is not altered digitally, it’s exactly the way it came out of the camera. For portraits, shallow depth of field is much preferable, but makes it much harder to focus. I was lucky in this one.
- my camera is set to “parameter 2”, meaning no in-camera sharpening.
- The 50mm lens on rebel XT is equal to 80mm in a full frame camera due to the 1.6 CCD size factor. an 80mm lens for a full frame 35mm camera is generally a good portrait lens.
- find a brief explanation of my usual workflow here.