The Brenizer effect

Lauren Scott creates panoramic portraits with a unique technique

The so-called ‘Brenizer’ method is named after wedding photographer Ryan Brenizer. You’ll probably have seen images in this style before, but not known the name of them – think photos with heavily blurred areas that are contrasted with sharply focused ones. In practice, final images are created by shooting several frames of a scene with one lens, and then stitching them together in editing software to create a panorama. So, what’s so special about this approach? For conventional landscape panoramas, most of the time you photograph horizontally or vertically. However, for Brenizer method panoramas (which are popular with portraits) you shoot around the subject’s surroundings as much as you cover them. This emphasises the amount of background blur and depth of field at a given field of view. The technique might seem like more of a faff than just shooting one image, but it really does produce unique results…