Camera lens for portrait

paddyrg

Cheat it in post? It happens a LOT, you may find your favourite photos in the papers have all been thoroughly rinsed through Photoshop/GIMP to bring out their best qualities.

Gloomendoom

paddyrg wrote: »

Cheat it in post? It happens a LOT, you may find your favourite photos in the papers have all been thoroughly rinsed through Photoshop/GIMP to bring out their best qualities.

Which is no different than we used to do when printing in a darkroom.

ukcarper

paddyrg wrote: »

Cheat it in post? It happens a LOT, you may find your favourite photos in the papers have all been thoroughly rinsed through Photoshop/GIMP to bring out their best qualities.

Problem is getting a good selection around hair in particular can be very difficult. It is much easier to get it right originally with the right lens say the 50mm f1.4 but by increasing distance from subject to background it should be possible to get good results with a slightly longer lens and smaller aperture.

lemontart

50mm or 80 mm fixed focal length are excellent choices if going to be doing a lot of portrait work I have nikon 50mm f1.8 which gives fantastic dof

http://ketteringsnappers.freeforums.net/thread/156/choosing-camera-lens

InsideInsurance

Background bluring is caused by the depth of field (the area that is in focus) being less than the distance between the focal point and the location of the background.

The depth of field is impacted by the lens length, the aperture and the distance to the subject. Longer the lens the more blur, the closer the subject, the more blur, the larger the aperture the more blur

Of cause lens length often impacts the minimum focal distance and so you have to balance this out.


In what environment will you be doing the photos? How much control will you have over the distance between you and the subject and the subject and the background? Are you wanting to do just headshots or full body?

Traditionally something like the 85mm 1.2 L would be used for studio photography where space is slightly limited and you want more than just headshots and something like the 200m 2.0 L for headshots.

On a crop frame you find the 50mm and 135mm probably take over to get a reasonable focal distance.

If you are out and about then a zoom becomes useful as you are less in control of the situation and so a 70-200mm 2.8 or such is great.


As already linked to, there are online calculators you can use to work out at any given distance which lens will give you the lowest DOF and thus the most blur.

Handsome90

ManAtHome wrote: »

If it's a NEX**, focal length crop (NEX to 35mm) is 1.5, so you have a 24-75mm and a (roughly) 80-300mm - I'd use the larger lens wide open around 70mm (100mm in 35mm terms).

**Lenses don't seem to tie in with NEX or Alpha packages, guessing at NEX as it's a 'compact'.

[edit] googled the focal lengths - could be NEX 6 - good reviews for both as kit lenses.

The model I've is called Sony A6000. I think it's the newer model than Nex-6. I have realised photography is a very expensive hobby since you've to buy lenses for different situations. I'll take some portraits tomorrow and see how they turn up. If I'm really desperate for more background blur (someone wrote earlier it's called bokeh?) I'll buy a second hand 50mm f/1.4 lens.

InsideInsurance wrote: »

Background bluring is caused by the depth of field (the area that is in focus) being less than the distance between the focal point and the location of the background.

The depth of field is impacted by the lens length, the aperture and the distance to the subject. Longer the lens the more blur, the closer the subject, the more blur, the larger the aperture the more blur

Of cause lens length often impacts the minimum focal distance and so you have to balance this out.


In what environment will you be doing the photos? How much control will you have over the distance between you and the subject and the subject and the background? Are you wanting to do just headshots or full body?

Traditionally something like the 85mm 1.2 L would be used for studio photography where space is slightly limited and you want more than just headshots and something like the 200m 2.0 L for headshots.

On a crop frame you find the 50mm and 135mm probably take over to get a reasonable focal distance.

If you are out and about then a zoom becomes useful as you are less in control of the situation and so a 70-200mm 2.8 or such is great.


As already linked to, there are online calculators you can use to work out at any given distance which lens will give you the lowest DOF and thus the most blur.

Thank you! This helped a lot

Johnmcl7

I'd take a look at the 50mm F1.8 OSS as recommended above:

http://www.sony.co.uk/electronics/camera-lenses/sel50f18

There's a few 50mm lenses Sony offer many of which aren't compatible with an E-mount camera like your A6000 so make sure you're looking at the right one. The 50mm gives an 85mm equivalent field of view which is a good choice for portrait photos, it's a reasonably cheap lens, the quality is good and the wide aperture doesn't just give you the benefit of being able to blur the background but it's useful in low light particularly with the image stabilisation (which Sony call OSS) the lens offers.

John

daveyjp

But if you are using a tripod turn off image stabilisation.