clear eyes that stand out

[Elly]

Derrell interesting point about FF.i hadnt thought that the extra dof compared to a crop sensor would have made much of a difference to popping the eyes.

btw for those that think im here to say one equipment is better and can do more than another you are wrong.i put up this thread because i have spent a lot of time looking at portraits with shallow dof and looking at the exif details.by a much larger percentage i have seen photos from nikon where the eyes looked perfect and i wanted to know if there was any logical reason to it.

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[Elly]

ps yes i know about light in eyes, eye colour, shutter speed, pp and whitening, adding or having catchlights, correct sharpening technique, shallow dof(though good point on ff), expose for eye, good lens, accurate focus . . .

[Derrel]

The eye pop on the litle boy in the vest is not the same as the sample photo Elly referred to--in the baby's photo, his vest is also sharp..his whole face is rendered sharply, as is his hair....one photo is a shallow depth of field effect created in-camera, the other is a Photoshop post procesing trick that adds sparkle to the eyes, but doesn't make them pop in the same way as what Elly is referring to. One pic has shallow DOF, the other has moderate DOF.

It "is" the camera, and the lens, at least some of the time. See this wedding recently linked to here in the TPF forums Fotografai Aleksandras Babicius ir Irina Belcikova

This wedding was shot with full-frame Nikon cameras and 14-24, 24-70,and 70-200 f/2.8 lenses. Take a look at the shallow depth of field wide-angle photos--that type of effect is impossible to achieve on a crop-sensor camera,especially with a slow kit lens that cannot provide any foreground/background separation due to the inherently deep DOF APS-C provides on wide-angle focal lengths. The "look" of the blonde woman's photo Elly linked us to is not anywhere the same as the baby photo...two very different things here. The difference in rendering between APS-C, FF 24x36, 645, and 6x7 medium format, as well as 4x5 film is significant at each different format size...that's why Canon, Sony,and Nikon make 24x36mm sensor cameras, and why people pay big money for Canon,Nikon, and Zeiss-for-Sony 85mm f/1.2 to f/1.4 lenses.