 JEEVAN |
Portrait Shots: What Lens Is Best? What type of lens should I use for taking photographs of people and faces? What lens (mm) do professional photographers use? Is it right to use a 12-24mm lens?
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Michael H. Cothran |
"Head shots" are best taken with a lens approximately 2x a normal lens. For 35mm film/cameras, a "normal" lens is considered to be 50mm, thus a good head shot lens would be in the neighborhood of 100mm. Any lens between 80mm and 135mm would be ideal. Personally, I would opt for either an 85mm or 105mm lens. Most major camera companies make these size lenses, and, of course, you could always use any zoom lens that covers this range. The "12-24mm" lens you mentioned is probably for digital cameras only, and should NEVER EVER be used for head shots unless you wanted to intentionally distort the person's features. Michael H. Cothran www.mhcphoto.net
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Jared S. Bludsworth |
now, what about the canon 17-40 USM 4/L? would that be ok?
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Christopher A. Vedros |
On a 35mm film camera, that lens would be too short for head shots. Even on a digital with a 1.6 lens factor, 40mm only gets you to about 65mm, which is still a bit short for head shots or single portraits. It wouldn't be bad for groups of people.
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Jared S. Bludsworth |
see, ive got the canon digital rebel 6.2 MP and thinking about using the 17-40mm for portraits. or I could use my telephoto lens (70-200mm) which would be to big though right? wouldnt the 17-40mm be better? if I needed to get a head shot in, ill move closer to the subject...that'll be ok right? thank you for the help.
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Shawn Wilson |
I'm new so take this with a grain of salt, but I've asked this same question and gotten the same type of answer from a lot of different people... The reason for a longer lens is because the 'compression' of the scene is more flattering for portraits. Like Michael said, the 'normal' focal length is 50mm for us digital people, so your 17-40 is out because you're completely in a wide angle zone with that one really. Wide angle focal lengths distort features and pronounce things that you don't want to pronounce like nose lengths and such. Your 70-200 is the way to go. Use it somewhere in the middle and you should be good (around the 100mm mark like Michael said) You want to be above the normal mark, so for us that's above 50mm at least. I've found that most photographers are saying that it's best to double that to 100mm or so. One thing to keep in mind though is that with your zoom lens your aperture might be a little worse than what you would want for portraits. It's good to be able to blur the background with a wide aperture (1.8 - 2.8) and am I right about your 70-200 in guessing that it's probably in the f/3-5 range? With that range of aperture you won't be able to get a good background blur very easily unless your background is very far away. A fixed aperature zoom is a bit pricy, but worth it. A prime lens is more affordable, but you'll have to move around. If you're ok with moving around, then try to find a good 100mm range prime lens (fixed focal length, non-zoom) around the f/2.8 range or better. You'll be glad you did. Hope that helps.
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