Easily The Best Lens For Portrait Photography

Easily the best lens for portrait photography, the telephoto prime, is a must for all serious portrait photographers. Here's why.

The Best Lens for Portraits

If you're an aspiring portrait photographer you'll want to understand what the best lens is for portrait photography. Of course, a more concrete answer will vary slightly from camera to camera, you can't go wrong with a slight telephoto prime lens.

What is a telephoto prime lens? A telephoto prime is a non-zoom lens. In other words it's a fixed focal length lens. Too, it's one that is slightly longer than a "normal" lens.

What do I mean by normal lens? A normal lens is one that is neither telephoto or wide angle. For simplicity, it's the equivalent of a 50mm lens on a full frame (35mm size sensor) camera. So, for a cropped sensor camera a telephoto lens is generally one larger than 35mm. Of course, this varies as there are different sized cropped sensors.

The Best Lenses For Portraits with Cropped Sensor Cameras

As mentioned above, the best lens for portraits with cropped sensor cameras are larger than 35mm. In fact, this is really great as it means you can invest in a "Fast 50" lens. What is a fast 50? It's a 50mm lens with a large maximum aperture. Okay, but what does that mean? It means that you can allow a ton of light in. As a result, you can get that blurry background even on a cropped sensor camera.

Better than a Fast 50

Of course, if you're serious about making the great portraits then you'll want something a little better than a Fast 50. My suggestion is something between a 70mm and 90mm. In fact, for the best portraits I wouldn't go beyond 90mm on a cropped sensor camera. If you do then you will have to get quite far from your subject even if you're only doing headshots. Too, if you want to do any half or whole body shots 90mm is going to be really tough.

Aperture matters

A large aperture is more important than the exact focal length. Something in the area of 1.4 or 1.8 is best. The smaller the number the better. If you're serious about finding the best portrait lens then you're going to want one with a really big aperture.

Of course you might find a lot of lenses with a maximum aperture of 2 or 2.8. This is great for general use but it's not going to be the best portrait lens. You really do want a larger maximum aperture.

Generally speaking the bigger the better. In other words, the smaller the number (as smaller number means larger aperture).

What is aperture? Find out in this article.

That said, I'd avoid those .95 manual focus lenses. Of course, they can produce amazing photos but they are so hard to get your focus right. Plus, your already looking through a small viewfinder. Therefore manually focusing one of those lenses is going to extra difficult.

  The Best Portrait Lens for Cropped Cameras

So, once again, the best portrait lenses for your cropped sensor camera are going to be in the 70 to 90mm range. In addition, it's going to have a large maximum aperture - in the 1.4 to 1.8 range.

The Best Lens for Portraits on Full Frame Cameras

Full frame cameras have larger sensors. Therefore the best lenses for portraits on full frame cameras need to be even larger. That said, the max aperture doesn't need to be. I'll explain more about that later.

70mm would be the absolute minimum of this range. In fact, 85mm or 90mm are really that sweet spot. In addition, a 105mm prime will also do amazing things.

Again, and just like with cropped sensor cameras, the longer the lens the better it is for close ups. Additionally, the longer the lens the farther away you'll need to be from your portrait subject.

Aperture, full frame sensors, and portrait lenses

When it comes to full frame sensors you don't need as large of apertures for your portrait lens. Of course, a 1.8 or even 1.4 are still great.

However, you can honestly get away with an f2 lens. This is especially true if you're using a 105mm or even a 100mm lens. Why? This is because full frame sensors are larger, meaning they show more background blur than their cropped sensor counterparts. As such, your lenses aperture doesn't need to get as large.

Bokeh, Blur, and Sensor Size

The stuff that is blurry, i.e. out-of-focus (often called Bokeh), is simply light that doesn't meet up at the same place on the sensor. In other words, what IS in focus is light that all meets up at the same spot on the sensor.

As a result the stuff that doesn't meet up projects a fuzzy cloud in the shape of the opening in our lens (often round or hexagonal).

Because larger sensor have more area more of these out-of-focus shapes show up on the sensor. In fact, this is why it's nearly impossible to get natural background blur on a cell phone - the sensors are just too tiny.

Portrait Mode

Portrait mode is a lie. What I mean is that the blur you see is not from the lens. In fact, it's from the camera taking two photos. The first photo is in focus and the second one is out-of-focus. Then it stitches them together.

In Conclusion

When it comes to choosing the best lens for portrait photography you want to go with a slight telephoto prime lens. Plus, you want to make sure it has a large maximum aperture. In addition, you'll want to check reviews of the lenses you're looking at to see if they work with your camera. Too, make sure that you check those reviews to ensure that the lens is sharp. The last thing you want is to buy a portrait lens that isn't sharp.

So, good luck on your portrait photography journey. I wish you all the luck in the world. Too, I hope you find and fall in love with your perfect lens for portrait photography. Take care friend!