South Light Portrait

From what I've read, early photography studios were built on the South side of streets with large north facing windows to take advantage of the soft northern light for portraiture(I believe this started pre-photography with painters). Laura was sitting on the couch tonight and I noticed the pretty light on her face - the sun doesn't shine in our northern windows this time of year so I made a 'South Light Portrait'.

I like this shot except for the fact that it is a bit soft - some camera shake resulted from a slowish shutter speed. I shot it at 1/80sec. and the focal length was 80mm following the 1/1 rule "focal length should equal shutter speed to avoid hand shake" - the rule needs to be adjusted because I use a camera with a smaller sensor than a 35mm film negative, but I thought that slack could be taken up by my lens's 'image stabilization'. I've never been a huge believer in image stabilization and I think this just further proves my point.

If I had taken this photo with a film camera I'd probably be happy with it - but with all the advantages of digital this is a bit of a letdown. The ability to review a shot and adjust setting based on the review screen makes my personal standards for shooting with my DSLR that much higher. I don't feel that everything I do has to be technically perfect but mistakes like this shouldn't happen....