Portrait Lenses

One question I get asked a lot is: "What's the best lens for taking classical portraits -- head and shoulders?" My typical answer is: "it depends." Usually, when you take a head & shoulders portrait, you want to throw the background out of focus so the attention is on the subject and not on the overall image. However, the quality of the out-of-focus areas -- the bokeh as photographers refer to it -- is important. Smooth, buttery out-of-focus highlights will make your portrait itself smoother and more professional. For the shot of our puppy, Moxie, I used my Canon 200mm F2.8L lens and shot her at F5.0. You'll notice that she is in focus from the tip of her nose to the top of her head but everything beyond that is softly diffused.


The picture of the Cavalier, Chesney, on the right was taken with my Canon 50mm F1.4 shot at F2.2. My objective was to highlight Chesney's beautiful headpiece while letting the background go blurry. The shot was taken in a hurry in front of our house in an area that is actually not all the pretty in focus but looks wonderful when you use a lens with lovely bokeh and let it go diffused. This image was used in a stud dog package and got Chesney some action the very first time it was sent out. Naturally, I'm taking full credit :)

The wedding portrait to the left, a candid taken during the reception, was intended to show Jennifer and Ray in a special moment during an otherwise chaotic day. Here they are dancing in a room full of people but they might as well be completely alone. They were so totally into each other and so very much in love. For this shot, I used my Canon 85mm F1.8 at F2.2 and ISO 3,200. There wasn't much light in the room but I didn't think that using flash would capture the mood. Plus I wanted to shoot at a wide aperture to set them off against a creamy background. I think this shot captures the mood and the moment and using the 85 instead of the 50 allowed me to be far enough away from them to not intrude on their emotions.

Three situations; three different lenses; three similar results. I prefer to use lenses that are "normal" to telephoto in terms of focal length because wide-angle lenses can distort facial features and make subjects look wider than they really are. In fact, I tell everyone that my self-portraits were all taken with a very wide-angle lens :). The way these portrait lenses compress the features and diffuse the backgrounds makes them my lenses of choice for portrait work both in the field and in the studio.