5 Best Lenses for Portrait Photography

Questions on the subject of lens choice are as limitless as lens choice itself. Show me 10 photographers and I’ll show you at least 11 divergent opinions on which lens is right for a particular type of photograph. On my sets and amongst the assistants, digital techs, and creatives I work with, a great deal of testing, experimenting, and spirited discussion goes on with respect to lens choice.

I almost never use autofocus lenses, preferring to explore the stripped down optical simplicity of manual focus lenses. There is a visceral connection I enjoy when I have a manual focus lens in my hand I don’t get with the fidgety automated chaos of an autofocus lens.

When it comes to which lenses are best for portrait photography, the short answer is that there is no such thing as a “best” lens for portrait photography or for any photography for that matter. A portrait is a subjective glimpse into a person’s soul. There is no one size fits all solution for which lens is best for a portrait.

The best lens is the one that works best to capture the essence of a particular subject. It’s up to each photographer to discover which lenses works to tell his or her story. That’s the philosophical side of the question.

In the meantime, life must go on, and in order to make photographs, we as photographers must make choices creatively and technically about the equipment we use to bring our creative visions to life.

Following is a list of my favorite 5 lenses currently on rotation in my kit. I use these lenses for everything—portraits, as well as landscapes, and technical composites of groups and other scenes.

Leica 35mm f/1.4 Summilux M ASPH II

This lens is tack sharp all the way through the entire aperture range, and wide open at 1.4 it has a 3-dimensional quality I can’t explain, but which I love. This lens is superb for any application. I use it on every shoot, especially for portraits with a more environmentally wide angle feel.

Leica APO-Summicron-M 50mm f/2 ASPH Lens

50mm is a focal length often considered to be boring, but Leica has achieved something sublime with this 50mm lens. It has a magical, imitable quality no other lens I’ve ever used can duplicate. Without fail, I cover every set-up I shoot with this lens because I love it so much.

Leica Telephoto 75mm f/2.0 APO Summicron M Aspherical Manual Focus Lens

Perhaps the most obvious “portrait” focal length in my kit, this lens just has a beautiful quality that can only be described as cinematic. I won’t say more, other than it’s a must-have in any portrait photographer’s kit

Zeiss Otus 85mm f/1.4 Apo Planar T* ZF.2 Lens for Nikon F-Mount

This lens is available in Canon or Nikon mount. I shoot Nikon, so I’m partial to the Nikon mount.

Zeiss uses the same vintage of glass in the Otus series lenses as they do in their world class cinema Mater Primes. With the 85mm Otus I get beautiful natural skin tones, and otherworldly out-of-focus background textures.

For a medium long lens, it’s hard to beat and I use it on every shoot with my Nikon D810. I’ve been able to eliminate medium format with this combination.

Zeiss 135mm f/2 Apo Sonnar T* ZF.2 Lens for Nikon F-Mount

135mm is my favorite long focal length. Zeiss have achieved something special with this particular lens. It’s razor sharp, renders beautiful natural skin tones, and has the most beautiful out of focus background texture. Indispensable.

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To me, lenses are like guitars. Each one has a particular look in the way that a guitar has a particular sound.

To that end, I don’t have just one lens that is perfect for all applications, I have a stable of lenses I rely on to help me capture the look and feel I’m after on a particular project. And as time goes by and my tastes change and evolve, so too do my lens choices.

I’ve found as I’ve matured that I’ve gravitated towards precision, quality, and simplicity in the lenses I use, and these 5 lenses are by far my staples.

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About the author: Kurt Iswarienko is a Malibu, CA-based celebrity portrait and commercial photographer. To see more of his work, check out his website or give him a follow on Facebook and Instagram. This post was also published here.

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This Guy Built a Fully-Functional Nikon Camera Halloween Costume

Inspired by a costume idea we first saw way back in 2011, photographer Bryan Troll turned himself into a fully-functional Nikon DSLR this Halloween. His ‘costume’ has a working flash, takes pictures, and even displays the results on an LCD!

Like we said, this isn’t a new idea—last year, we covered 4 of these, and we spotted the first one back in 2011. But we never get sick these intense, creative costumes for camera nerds. Well, resourceful camera nerds anyway. Because this isn’t a cheap or easy costume to build.

“I spent at least 40 hours making it over many late nights, about $100 in cardboard, tape, rubber cement, plexiglass, and spray paint, and stuffed it with a few thousand dollars in camera equipment,” Troll told DIY Photography. Here are some photos of the costume in-development:

And a video of the final product, working as promised:

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Like any good photographer, Bryan spent his Halloween weekend on the town taking photos of other revelers. The Palm Beach Post spotted him out, and earlier today he uploaded some of the photos he captured of other costume-clad folks who were, no doubt, super jealous of his costume.

To see more photos of Bryan’s costume, and whole lot more of the street photos he captured while out celebrating Halloween this weekend in style, head over to his Facebook page.

(via DIYP)

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Image credits: Photos by Bryan Troll and used with permission.

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What I Learned from My First Instagram Takeover

At the time of my takeover of the Visit Faroe Islands account, my own account was around 5k followers. To briefly run and manage a page that has surpassed 100k was a great learning experience. Here are a few things I learned along the way that might help others.

1. At that level, you will naturally have a larger base of people exposed to your work, meaning more opportunity for polarized reactions. You will have those that are head over heels they have found you; you will have those that leave hate-filled comments. You have to know your worth, and not be distressed if someone leaves a rude comment.

2. Building on that, PR is important. Everything reflects on your self-brand: each comment, like, follow, etc. As you go up, it matters more, meaning you need to be more conscientious of the things you do on the account. Your responses will be monitored by more people, and the words you choose do matter.

3. It is hard to determine when your demographic is most active online when dealing with an international audience. When most of your followers are from one place, this is much easier to do. Although you could argue that at 100k+ timing is irrelevant, it’s still important if you want to continue growing.

4. For takeovers, you need to tread a fine line between what people that follow the account expect to see, and interjecting your own uniqueness. Too unique, and you will throw people off. Too similar, and you won’t be noticed. The content of mine that performed best was that which showed a familiar location in a slightly different way. I had some people complain about a lack of originality as well, but when I posted something more out of the box it would have less than 1/10th of the engagement.

5. Use the previous accounts that have done takeovers to gauge what works and what doesn’t. See whose work has had good reception, analyze why, and think of how to apply this knowledge to yours.

6. Plan meticulously. Maybe this one is just me, but I like forming a narrative and a cohesive string of content that all ties together. I spent hours planning the order which I would put the shots in, composing engaging captions, debating how to best interject my handle, and ensuring I managed the page with the same efficiency which I try to do with my own.

7. Create your own hashtag. This is a way to see the posts easily after the takeover, and reflects well on you for your creative thinking and strategic social media management. For example, all of my posts from my takeover can be found under the tag #alexroamsfaroes

8. Be mature in your approach, and reflect a level of professionalism that you would expect to see in anyone that you or any company may hire. Everyone I’ve ever looked up to in photography has been incredibly humble considering what they have accomplished. If you act overly confident in your posts, replies, email correspondence, etc; you come across as immature and unprofessional, lessening the chance that this will lead to future work with the brand in question, or anyone else seeing the content.

9. Pick the best of the best. I had lots of content from my trip to the Faroe Islands so I was able to do this and still post 3 times a day, but it is better to post once a day with high quality imagery than to spam the followers with mediocre imagery. There were many images I deliberated about keeping in, that had good stories but less enticing imagery and as such they did not make the cut. You should only be showing the pictures that are the best reflection of your work, as they will engage people and show what you are about.

10. Have fun! All of this aside, don’t stress things and remember that this is (if you have a takeover coming up) an excellent opportunity that you have been given (by someone who believes in your work) to grow and learn.

I hope that some of these tips are useful to those doing a takeover soon, or just for social networking in general. If you would like to see my work, this is my Instagram; if you would like to see the Visit Faroe Islands page I took over, it can be found here.

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About the Author: Alex Stelmacovich is a Toronto-based photographer and creative director. To see more of his work, head over to his website or give him a follow on Instagram. These tips were also published here.

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