Portrait Photography Tips

You are watching Digital Photography One-On-One where we answer your questions. Here is your host Mark Wallace. In this episode, we are going to talk about how our lens choices impact our portraits. So let us dive in. Linda Connor wrote, “I noticed you shoot a lot with your 72-200 mm lens. I have a Canon 72-200 lens I used for sport, but I never thought about using that lens for portraits. I usually use a smaller lens. Well, thanks for the question Linda and you are right, I do shoot with my 72-200. It is actually a Canon 72-200 mm F-2.8L. And this is by far my favorite lens for portrait look. I favor longer lens for several reasons. The first is distortion. When you use a wide angle lens which is also known as a short lens, you have to get closer to your subject to fill the frame. This causes things to be become distorted. Things in the foreground look very large and things in the background look very small. Usually, this translates into our subject looking like to have big noses or odd shapes of the bodies. The longer lens requires us to get farther from the subject to minimize that distortion. There is another reason that I prefer the longer lenses, angle of view. Angle of view is simply how much the lens can see. As the name implies, a wider angle lens has a wider angle of view. This means that we will see much more of the background and this can cause cluttered images. Longer lenses having narrower angle of view and narrower angle of view will allow us to capture less of the background. This will help us keep the image clean and uncluttered. Now let us put these two things in the practice. I asked Jenny to help me demonstrate this. We are going to begin by shooting a simple headshot with a side angle lens. Now, I am going to use an 18 mm lens which is really going to exaggerate things. All right, let us get started. [Demo] All right, you noticed that in order to get a nice tight headshot, I had to really get close to Jenny and this really makes your subjects uncomfortable and its another reason I prefer longer lenses, now let us take a look at those photos. It is obvious in these shots, we got some issues. We have some serious distortion and we have way too much of the background in the scene. All right, let us shoot again and this time with my 70-200 mm. And because I am using a longer lens, I have to shoot farther from my subject. This will put your model at ease and it will fix some of the distortion, all right let us shoot that again. [Demo] All right, that was much better. Let us take a look at those pictures. You can see that these shots have no distortion and the background is nice and clean. Another reason I like my 70-200 mm is that it is a zoom lens. This allows me to compose medium length shots as well as nice head shots without having to move. Take a look at these, all of these shots were taken from the same location. Okay, let us review. When shooting portraits, a longer lens has some benefits. A longer lens gives you a narrower angle of view. This will simplify your background and eliminate clutter. Less distortion since you are shooting from a greater distance from your subject, things will have a more realistic perspective. This will also allow you subjects to feel more comfortable because you are not so close. And the zoom lens will allow you to compose multiple shots from the same location. Now, I am not saying that you cannot use a wide angle lens for portrait work, there are times when it is appropriate, for example if you want to exaggerate a feature or take a very cute picture of your dog, a wide angle lens is definitely the way to go. And the truth is, there are photographers who use wide angle lens for portrait photography and are very successful. Platon is probably the most famous of these photographers. You can view his work at platon.photo.com. It is a terrific work. All right, thanks for joining us and thank you Jenny for all your help. Remember if you have a question, please send it to studiolighting@gmail.com. I will see you next time. This episode is brought to you by snapfactory.com and studio lighting.net. For more information about our workshops, visit snapfactory.com.