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RE: An Essential Guide to Portraits: How to Take a Fantastic Portrait For Beginners
Amazing and very usefull article. From my experience I can say that the camera is not very important for take amazing portraits, the most important is the lens.
For portraits I ussually use Nikkor 35 mm F/1.8, 18-140mm F/4.5-5.6 on focal length > 50 mm for get nice bokeh
You are doing really nice job keep going!
Classic portrait lenses, ”kings of bokeh” would be Canon’s and Nikon’s 85mm f1.4, and now we have Fuji 56mm f1.2 as a brilliant and relatively affordable solution. Canon’s 135mm f2 L is fantastic but very expensive, and I had very good results with their 100mm f2.8 macro lens, which can serve very well as a portrait lens.
On a wider scale it is not easy to find a pair for that wonderful Leica’s Summicron 35mm f2. Nikkor is very good but big and heavy. Sometimes it’s simpler and easier to buy a whole Fujifilm X100f and use it for an ambient portraits.
Those are some great lenses. I wish I had the money to buy some to improve my shots :) The Nikkor is nothing compared to my medium format film gear so I feel light when carrying around the digital.
I have a "King of Bokeh" Lens but it's kinda old and needs an adapter and to be honest I haven't spent that much time with it. The Pentacon "bokeh monster" 135 2.8 with its 15 aperture blades has some great results online and I should make more of an effort with it. But it's heavy and metal and it's winter here right now haha
Thanks for the feedback ;) Yeah I have to agree that the camera doesn't make the difference any more than a writer suddenly becoming better by using a computer - it's the photographer that makes the difference. Those are some wonderful lenses; I want to get a fast 35mm maybe in the future :)