PORTRAIT PRIMES

Matthew Richards searches for the best fast and short portrait prime lenses

o n a full-frame DSLR, an 85mm prime lens with a wide aperture is the ideal optic for portraiture. It enables you to capture head and shoulders, or half-length portraits at a comfortable working distance, so you’re close enough to direct your subject without invading their personal space and literally being in their face. This is the ideal spacing for portraits Meanwhile, the typical widest aperture of f/1.4, or f/1.8, enables a tight depth of field, so you can throw fussy backgrounds out of focus and focus all the attention on the portrait sitter. Another advantage of relatively wide apertures, compared with most zoom lenses, is that you can keep shutter speeds fast enough to freeze any slight movement on the part of the camera or the person being photographed. You can do this even under dim lighting, retaining a natural look without resorting to using flash. Naturally, on an APS-C format camera, with a smaller image sensor, the 1.6x crop factor makes an 85mm equivalent to using a 136mm focal length on a full-frame body. Unless you’re doing really tightly framed head shots, this is too long for comfort, and you’ll feel somewhat remote from your subject. The solution is to use a 50mm lens instead, typically designed as a standard prime for full-frame bodies but with an ideal effective focal length of 80mm on cameras like the 800D and 80D. A good prime lens needn’t cost a fortune either, and there are some of the best bargains to be had.