Jane Bown

Of all the photographers I've studied so far, Jane Bown has probably been the most useful and influencial to the portrait work I've been doing. She is of 'diminuitive stature' and plans her shoots carefully as she invariably uses natural light from a window. She sometimes uses an angle poise lamp as additional lighting to light the eyes. She is uses an Olympus camera with an 85mm lens, and set it, invariably, at a shutter speed of 1/60th of a second with the aperture at f2.8. This combination of wide aperture on a close-up lens produced a very thin depth of field. So by focusing on her subject's head and, in particular, their eyes, she caught their faces in a way that isolated them, sharply, against hazy backgrounds. At the same time, she made sure the light caught her subject's eyes.

Here's a link to a video called 'How to Take a Jane Bown Portrait.'