Natural portraits

Alistair Campbell pays a visit to Bath’s Botanical Gardens to combine people and nature

Shooting portraits and working with people can be a great way to improve your photography skills. Traditionally having a pleasing blurry background will focus the attention on your subject, but this is also true of foregrounds, too. A well-thought-out foreground can also act as a natural frame for your image to sit within. I headed to the Botanical Gardens in Bath with Poppy to shoot some fun portraits with Christmas colours, and to attempt shooting through flowers and branches along the way. I took my Fujifilm X-T3 and an affordable 7Artisans 25mm f/1.8 lens. For a conventional portrait you might find this focal length a little wide, but I knew I needed some space to fill the foreground, and to surround Poppy with out-of-focus branches near my camera. This is a manual-focus

lens, which can be tricky at the best of times, let alone while trying to hold flowers in place, too.

You’ll find a few options in your camera’s AF/MF (auto or manual focus assist) menu – with options such as ‘peaking’, which highlights the areas in focus with an overlay in a colour of your choice.

Model: Poppyella Instagram: @poppy.my.wardrobe