moondigger
Offline
• • • • •
Upload & Sell: Off
|
 p.1 #9 · A lens for full body shots? | |
Don't worry about not being able to afford the 85L... it's too long for practical use with full-body portraits anyway. You have to figure out how far away from your subjects you want to position the camera. Use your 24-105 zoom to take some full body shots of people of various heights, and see what focal length you're working with most often. Then you can pick the right lens.
At the risk of irritating some folks who have seen my comments about this topic before, I'll copy/paste some stuff from other threads that might be useful to you regarding perspective and compression for portraits:
----------
Remember that in terms of facial perspective, it makes zero difference what the focal length is; what matters is the camera to subject distance. Perspective is a function of distance, not focal length. Focal length only ties into it when you normalize subject size in the frame -- doing so will put you at different camera/subject distances for different focal lengths.
-----------
A good friend of mine from college was working in the 'sitting room' -- a studio area set up for portraiture for our college photography classes. You brought your own camera, but there was a good selection of hot lights and strobes to choose from, as well as backgrounds, chairs, stools, etc. He needed subjects for his class assignment, so I volunteered. I'm of Italian descent, and have a typical 'Roman' nose -- meaning it's larger than average. My friend decided that in order to flatten my features a bit, he would use his 135 mm lens for head shots. He set everything up, and took the head shots.
Now he wants to do a full-body portrait. The stool I had been sitting on goes away, the background and lights are changed a bit, and I'm standing there. I'm 6' 2" tall. My friend started backing up the tripod, checking the view through the viewfinder as he moved back. Unfortunately he backed up right into the back wall of the studio and still couldn't get me entirely within the frame -- not even close, unfortunately. I suggested he'd just have to use a shorter lens, like a 50.
"Sorry, bud," he said to me, "but I don't want to emphasize that nose of yours any more than I have to."
Now this was kind of funny, because my nose isn't that big -- I'm no Jimmy Durante. But he used to like to joke around about it. Anyway, he did end up changing to a shorter lens - a zoom, positioned almost right against the back wall, and zoomed to as long a focal length as possible, probably somewhere around 60 or 70 mm. "Well, it's not into the pleasing range, but it'll have to do." (He considered the "pleasing range" to be 85 - 135 mm.)
You see where I'm going with this? He presented his portraits in class, and mentioned how he "ran out of room" in the studio and couldn't use a long enough lens to get a pleasing perspective for the standing full-body shots. Our professor asked him to take a look at the pics and identify which shots exhibited more facial compression. Without looking, he said, "the head shots, of course."
Professor tells him again -- "look at the photos, tell me which ones show more facial compression."
He looks carefully at the photos he had shot, developed and printed himself just a few days before. "I don't understand. It looks like there's more compression in the shots I took with the shorter lens." Thus my friend and I were the "example to the class" about how lenses don't impart 'perspective' or 'compression' on a scene -- that in reality, it's subject to camera distance.
The point here is that my friend could have saved a lot of hassle and gotten the same pleasing facial compression for my 'big nose' if he had left the tripod planted exactly where it was for the head shots and just switched to a short lens, like a 28, for the full body shots. He didn't understand this important concept -- and neither did I, at the time.
This is actually a poorly-understood concept, even among photography enthusiasts. There have been long threads about it here in the past. I don't know if the OP knew it or not, but since he was asking about how suitable the 35 mm focal length was for portraits, I thought it was worth mentioning it. If he already knew, then it just serves as a reminder. If he didn't know, then maybe by explaining it I can save him some future concern or hassle.
---------
Edited on Apr 27, 2008 at 08:25 PM
|
