Portrait Lens
 

I am looking at getting a new Portrait lens for my Canon 400D.
Does any fellow forum member have any suggestions what i should go for? :confused:

BTW my current setup includes 3 studio lights so will be using the camera in an indoors studio.

Any help would be gratfully received!

Craig
:)

the big question is what's your budget?

Well i dont want to spend a fortune thats for sure lol just a reasonably good lens that wont break the bank. Not really sure though what i should be looking for?

Craig

There are loads of decent portrait lenses out there it just comes down to what suits your style and budget. Ideally you want a fast lens (small f number) as this will allow you to blur background nicely. The cheapest option that will give good results is the Canon 50 f1.8 (often referred to as the nifty fifty) and ~£80 it is one of the best value lenses around. But it's a fixed focal length which may or may not suit. My main portrait lens is an old Canon 28-70 f2.8 (now replaced with the 24-70 f2.8), it's a lovely lens but is big, heavy and expensive. Sigma and Tamron both make lenses of a similar spec which are a deal cheaper but I have no personal expereince so can't comment on the quality.

Thank you very very much for your reccomendations, ill go straight away and have a look online and see the lens you have suggested.

Thank you again that has helped loads!

Craig
:)

Craig, the other question I would ask is how much space you will have for doing your portraits, and what style of portraits (full length, head/shoulders, tight crop, etc.) you are planning on shooting?

If you're using a small space, and want to do full length standing shots, then you'll be very restricted on what you can use.

Well i will be shooting them in i would imagine quite confined spaces as it will be in living rooms or so to speak. it would be mainly head and shoulders that sort of thing.
i would really appreciate any assistance in my choice of lens for this sort of photography.

Craig :)

If you're only going to be doing head/shoulders stuff, then something in the region of 50-70mm should be fine.

If you try portrait shots now with your "kit" lens do you end up using the 50-55mm end most of the time and find that suits your needs? If so then the 50mm 1.8 would meet your needs admirably, if not what is your inclination of what you need? Wider? Longer? The answer to that should guide you to what you need. My guess is that in the conditions you talk about the 50mm 1.8 is the one to go for, it feels rather light weight but is very sharp and has the f1.8 for narrow DOF when needed.

f/1.8 at the kind of ranges in use in a small living room will give an exceptionally short DoF, probably too short, unless you want the sitter's nose to be out of focus. Or, more likely, the nose in focus and the eyes out of focus. Not a good proposition.....

It does not have to stay on f1.8, you can change it to other apertures as required you know! The f1.8 gives you the opportunity for narrow depth of field, for example only the nearest eye in focus.

Never was a truer word spoke by mortal man Mike............ I use a 50mm on a 1.6 crop as my 'goto' lens and it is a superb portrait lens and the fact that its the 1.2 means you can also get the narrow DOF and subject isolation in much larger areas.:)

How about f1.4 lenses? I recently acquired the Zuiko 50mm f1.4 for OM-system, reported to be an excellent lens. Do they give an unusably small DoF when wide open?

Unusable? Depends what effect you are after! Run a series of test shots with the camera on a tripod so you know what to expect at different apertures. Don't forget that changing camera/subject distance has quite a marked effect at close quarters.

Take a look at
http://www.dofmaster.com/dofjs.html
a 50mm lens on 35mm film at f/1.4 and a subject distance of 4ft (not an unreasonable assumption for a portrait shot), gives a DoF between 3.92ft. and 4.08ft. As Mike says, it depends what effect you're after. Just bear in mind it gets very very shallow at these apertures and distances which consequently may not give the results you were after.

Thanks for the info, I'll have a play around. I guess f1.4 is a last resort, it's far more common for me to shoot between 2.8 and 11.

I recommend a Canon FL 55mm f1.2.;)

Or for a longer FL portrait lens the Canon FD 85mm f1.2 L....Even wide open its sharp with virtually no CA or abberations...Near perfect IMO. In fact I'd go as far as to say its that good at f1.2 as my Carl Zeiss 85mm f1.4 Distagon T* is at f2 or even f2.8!;)