What aRE PORTRAITS?!!?!?!**

[Raz.]

I have never taken actual portraits. all I have ever done has been candid pictures of OTHER people, street life, or weird shit like light painting.

and by portraits I mean shit like this.

http://samdahmanphotography.tumblr.com/page/2

my question is what lens do you all usually use? I literally just bought a 50mm 1.4 and pretty much hate the fixed focal length. its my first nonzoom lens and I feel like I have to be so fucking far away all the time.

any tips? etc?

 

[eheath]

I mean, 50mm on a crop camera is tight. Should look into a 35mm or 30mm.

 

[Balto]

Well you are shit out of luck because real photographers use primes. Chances are any important portrait from history you can think of was shot with a prime lens.

 

[No.Quarter]

Your legs are now your zoom with that lens.

If it is too long of a focal length, i'm assuming you are using a crop body, get something wider. 85mm is pretty standard for full frame portraits, and 50mm falls somewhere around there on a crop body.

One more thing, primes usually have much better optical quality than zooms. Even a nifty fifty has better quality than a lot of zooms, even some L series zooms

 

[Laurent.]

There's a reason you use a longer focal length for portraits:

 

[bo0b]

I like taking portraits a lot, and pretty much the only lens I use for them is my 85mm, and a 50mm with a 1.6 crop sensor is 80mm, so that should be perfect. once you get used to how far away you have to be and start working around it it's fine. Portraits are usually just chest/shoulders up and some context anyways, so you really don't need anything that wide.

 

[TWoods]

50 is good for a crop sensor cam... Most people shoot bust style portraits at 85-135 so you are compressing the space a little, and not dealing with distortion in the face of your subject. On a crop sensor body, 50mm = ~75mm

Portrait generally just refers to a photo where there is a person that is intentionally the subject. It can be a bust (shoulders, neck, head), which is the traditional concept of a portrait:

Or, a portrait can include the situation at hand, allowing you to experience a little more of that person, who they are, what they are about, what they are doing... but still focuses on that person and how what else is going on around them is adding to your experience of them

(I saw the most awesome portrait of a syrian rebel the other night, but can't find it today)

So, calling something a "portrait lens" is sorta silly to me... there are some lenses with wonderful bokeh characteristics and focal lengths that are helpful, but a portrait isn't really defined by a focal length, you know?

 

[TWoods]

also, sorry, didn't see the site... most of those look to be pretty standard focal lengths, there's not much if any exaggerated perspective. you should be able to get that feel in terms of perspective from your 50.