Capture light with Sony’s 100mm STF lens while waiting for the darkest day of the year

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December 21st marks the shortest, and therefore darkest, day of the year, as the Sun reaches its lowest point in the sky. For many, the winter solstice means cozy socks, warm drinks, and fleeting glimpses of daylight. For photographers, however, the darker days offer a wealth of creative possibilities using both artificial light and the fantastic glows that natural light offers during this season.

To celebrate this beautiful time of year, Sony challenged a series of portrait photographers across Europe to capture winter light and create stunning images with the SEL100F28GM lens.

• Josef Bollwein – Austria
• Petar Sabol – Croatia
• Jan Tichy – Czech Republic
• Lærke Posselt – Denmark
• Kaupo Kikkas – Estonia
• Bertrand Bernager – France
• Robert Maschke – Germany
• Maki Galimberti – Italy
• Marco Ter Beek – Netherlands
• Jan Kriwol – Poland
• Alin Popescu – Romania
• Uros Podlogar – Slovenia

To ensure that bright light doesn’t appear harsh on the eyes in dimmer situations, a blurred background can add a level of softness to an otherwise brightly lit photograph.

Given the SEL100F28GM’s key characteristics of extreme resolution and outstanding bokeh, made possible by the unique Smooth Trans Focus, this lens allows photographers to push their creative boundaries in various lighting conditions. Thanks to the lens’s extreme depth of field and its 11-blade aperture, combined with the unique optical apodization element, different light sources transform into beautiful, round glows of incandescent light, while the foreground remains exceptionally sharp. From fairy lights to sparkles, city skylines to bridges, streetlights to shop windows, the SEL100F28GM transforms every light source into an incredible opportunity to produce a variety of original images, making the background just as much a part of the image as the foreground.

At this point, all that’s left is to grab your camera and take advantage of the beauty around us this time of year.

To guide us in our shoots, Maki Galimberti has shared some tips on how to create stunning images during the winter solstice.

• Choose a subject and the story you want to tell through your photos. In the first series of images, I wanted to depict Venice and its inhabitants during a typical winter day, characterized by extremely bright lights and sharp shadows; in the second, I thought about telling the story of the ‘selfie’ trend in one of Milan’s nightlife areas. Focus on the story you want to tell, and if you feel the subject doesn’t fit, change it.
• For portraits to look natural, the subject needs to feel comfortable. And for the subject to stand out against the background, separate them well from what is depicted in the background.
• Study your subject well and use natural light or background illumination to enhance them.
• Position the subject in the brightest area and use the lights and background elements to enrich the image.
• Choose a lens capable of ensuring a natural bokeh effect, ideal for portraits, effectively managing the strong contrasts between light and shadow, as in the photo taken at the fish market.
• To achieve a soft and natural bokeh effect, shoot at the widest aperture.
• Use a lens capable of handling sharp transitions between light and shadow without loss of detail or artifacts, while ensuring extreme resolution and depth of field, with a medium-format look, like Sony’s SEL100F28. This transition, which is normally difficult to manage, becomes an asset with this lens’s STF, as it manages to render extremely homogeneous blurred backgrounds.
• Take advantage of every light source to recreate the perfect background for your winter-themed images.
• Don’t consider the harsh winter light and strong shadows, as well as the sudden transition between light and dark, an obstacle; instead, try using lights and shadows to ‘paint’ the image.
• If you’re shooting during the shortest days of the year, use light and shadow to enhance the depth of field and sharpness of the photograph, creating a natural defocus (or bokeh) in the background.
• If you want to enrich the photo with a Christmas atmosphere, get closer to your subject and create a bokeh effect with the background lights, thus recreating a typical fairytale atmosphere. Obviously, a lens capable of rendering a perfectly circular bokeh enhances the effect, as in the photos taken on the Navigli, softly blurring the background and leaving the foreground extremely sharp.
• If the situation allows, use water droplets or ice crystals to emphasize both the depth of field and the details through bright or softly blurred elements, as in the photo of the seagull.