full lenght portrait lens

[vic_canberra]

<p>ok jeff you was a photographer since your first photo<br>

you were a genius <br>

renoir went to a academy of art<br>

and in a academy yes someone explains you everything also what kind of brush you should use</p>

 

[Spearhead]

<blockquote>

<p>ok jeff you was a photographer since your first photo<br />you were a genius </p>

</blockquote>

<p>Maybe instead of pointless sarcasm, you could ask how I got to where I am. Even though you didn't ask, I will tell you, since you seem to think you know what you don't know.</p>

<p>I started with a 50mm lens. For ten years, that was all I used, and all my teacher at the time had me use. I had to process everything in the darkroom myself, print and explain what my photos meant. There was never any question of "which lens," it was only about "why this photograph?" Later, I had a mentor who was a very successful commercial and "fine art" photographer. He kept me on a one lens track and on explaining my photos. Why they worked, why they didn't. One day he suggested a try an ultra-wide lens, which changed quite a bit of my work at the time because I had to get much closer. It was the proximity to the subject rather than the lens itself that changed what I was doing. </p>

<p>And now, even for the commercial work, I almost always use a single lens, a short range zoom. I have to use a zoom because some of what I do is sports, but I don't change it out. Instead, I learned how to use it to say what I was always trying to say.</p>

<p><br />Although I suggested a zoom for learning, I would suggest more than that trying to make the lens you have do what you want.</p>

[eddymendoza]

Hi all, I'm wondering if any fashion photographers here are using a 60mm lens as stated in one post. I use a 50, 85 and sometimes

100 when using 35mm equipment but normally an 80 or longer with medium format. I'm wondering who makes a 60mm lens old or new.

 

Thanks

 

Ed

[vic_canberra]

<p>yes jeff <br>

i appreciate your answer</p>

<p>after my question i have been criticized no one know me or my studies or my background<br>

but some of you hit out<br>

i will borrow some lenses <br>

that is a good choice <br>

someone linked me a book without asking that i have read some books and yes i have read photography books and art books because i were an art student<br>

it sounds weird for mature person </p>

[vic_canberra]

<p>(in art school teachers explain almost everything but art is your)<br>

and looking a photo can help in doing composition or learn light but <br>

it's not the same of a real photographer that helps you</p>

[vic_canberra]

<p>(my english maybe it's not so good when i write @pc)<br>

i have got a mixed language and isn't easy </p>

[eddymendoza]

<p>I didn't realize when I wrote that the 60mm was the macro! My apologies. </p>

[Two23]

<p>Purple--<br>

Your English is good enough, I think.</p>

<p>Kent in SD</p>

[Rene11664880918]

<p>This is just my humble opinion....<br>

Let's be friendly and patient with new comers to the forum.... especially with beginners...<br>

Every time I can i log into the Nikon forum and I read almost every thread. There are hundreds of similar threads.... "What lens should I buy?" "Should I upgrade to a better or newer camera?", etc. I have myself asked so many boring questions but at the same time I have learned so much over here.<br>

I read almost all of the threads and If I have something to say I would say it. If I think it is a boring or repeat question I just ignore it and it doesn't bother me.<br>

In a situation like this I think the admins are the one to decide if they should let the thread to go on or not. And for the rest of us the job is to help if we can or just ignore it if we don't wanna help or can't help.<br>

@ PURPLE...<br>

I think you got 2 good advices here. <br>

1 is to buy a zoom and find out what focal length would help you most and then get a prime that will do the job for you.<br>

2 is to use what you have and try to get the results you want. This means you will do the work instead of having the lens work for you. This will help you to find your own style and teach you how to work with what you have. One day you might become a pro and might have the best toys Nikon can offer but you could get stock in the field and your best lens breaks. You will have to improvise with what you have and get the job done.<br>

Last, your English is good enough and that is not a problem here.<br>

Cheers!</p>

 

[jose_angel]

<p>(I think I emphatize with Purple... I have to recognize that the first camera I bought, at the age of 16?, was a Canon with a 135mm prime... which I used for almost one year in all situations. I was sure I wanted a tele lens. All other considerations were unimportant... )</p>

<p>Purple, almost all my photos are portraits; from full body to head and shoulders, and a few tight head shots.</p>

<p>I have a closet full of lenses, in every focal lenght and almost every type from the shortest wide angle up to 800mm, old and modern. I started my collection in 1980, aprox.</p>

<p>If it helps, my most used lenses in FX for that task are a 50mm prime, a 105mm prime and a 24-70/24-120 zoom.</p>

<p>Translated to DX the equivalent could be a 35mm prime, a 60/85 mm prime and a 17-55/16-85 zoom. Given that you already have a 50mm prime, IMHO it makes sense to have for fun a 85mm prime, keeping the 50. You`ll probably miss in a short time a wider lens. Obviously an standard zoom will provide all this focals, but sooner or later, and specially if you are really involved, they could not be fast enough for your creative purposes.</p>

<p>Pros around here use mostly two zooms; 24-70 and 70-200. Yesterday I met one shooting for an add in a fashion magazine with a 5D + 24-105 zoom. In Nikon DX it means a 15-65mm zoom, aprox. (17-55/16-85).</p>

<p>But keep in mind that Jeff`s advice is the best you can have. He wants you to be a photographer, not a mere machine operator.</p>

[vic_canberra]

<p>that you eddie, villela and jose angel<br>

i have to agree with villela<br>

i read a lot of similar questions in every forum but if i answer i try to be patient and i answer politely expecially with people who is starting something, in photography when you start there are a lot of doubts maybe they could be silly for experienced photographer<br>

but not for newcomer.</p>

[vic_canberra]

<p>my parents will give me a present for my birthday <br>

but 24 70 maybe it's a professional lens and i will not use correctly at this moment<br>

and i prefer prime lens because i shoot expecially outdoor walking around cities taking my equipement <br>

i have used 35mm f2 but i don't like it for portrait face or full body<br>

for the face give me a strange effect and also for the body <br>

85mm watching around photos seems to be perfect for portrait<br>

but i m checking myself because i' d like to know which is the distance that i have to stay having a dx camera from the person to take a full lenght image, someone tell me 22 ft 7 meters is it correct?</p>

 

[vic_canberra]

<p>i am trying to ask if 85 it is perfect for face portrait but have got limited usage in other circumstances</p>

 

[vic_canberra]

<p>the only zoom that i have it a zoom used with an old camera 35mm and <br>

@35 this zoom <br>

it's fine for landscape<br>

and 100 it's fine for portrait but it s not a fast lens and the photos sometimes are not good</p>

[studio460]

<p>purple purple:</p>

<p>Full-length fashion photos are some of my favorite visuals for models. The sensible recommendation is to suggest a variety of short- to short-telephoto lenses to add to your kit. A 35mm f/1.8, and an 85mm f/1.8 should complement your 50mm f/1.8 quite well on a DX body. But, I think you seek the shallow depth-of-field type of full-length fashion shots, like the kind often seen in fashion magazine editorial spreads. Many of these are shot with slightly longer-than-normal lenses (i.e., your 35mm on a DX body being "normal"), and at times, much longer than "normal."</p>

<p>In the January 2011 edition of Spanish <em>Elle</em>, there's two editorial spreads titled, "Deporte de Ciudad," and "Duo con Suerte." All photos in these spreads are full-length shots, and is the reason I bought this particular issue (I'm sorry, but I searched the Elle Spain site, but cannot find the editorials online to provide a link).</p>

<p>The first series employs slightly long lenses, employing shallow depth-of-field (note that it's more difficult to achieve this effect with a high-numerical aperture zoom lens, like say an f/3.5-5.6 kit lens, unless your background elements are very far away). Shots are of single models in various daylight exterior street settings. If shot on a Nikon FX body, these shots could be approximated with anything from a 105mm f/2.0 DC-Nikkor, 135mm f/2.0 DC-Nikkor, a 200mm f/2.0 tele, or a 70-200mm f/2.8 zoom. The perspective is rather compressed, and the background, out of focus. Again, these are some of my favorite types of shots for fashion.</p>

<p>The second series is more "verite" style. Apparently (as far as I can tell), shot with shorter primes (or a short, fast zoom), if I had to guess, the first image may have been shot with a 50mm. The latter photos appear longer, perhaps a 105mm or 135mm.</p>

<p>In any case, the addition of relatively fast 35mm and 85mm lenses will allow you to experiment with these types of shots, and should enable you to emulate these styles quite faithfully. Good luck!</p>

[studio460]

<p>purple purple said:</p>

<blockquote>

<p>my parents will give me a present for my birthday <br />but 24 70 maybe it's a professional lens and i will not use correctly at this moment<br />and i prefer prime lens because i shoot expecially outdoor walking around cities taking my equipement . . .<br /><br />. . . 85mm watching around photos seems to be perfect for portrait</p>

</blockquote>

<p>While a 24-70mm f/2.8 is a fine lens, it's not my cup of tea (I prefer primes as well). If your parents are willing to spend $1,700 USD on a pricey zoom lens for you, you may want to opt instead for the similarly pricey, but gorgeous, AF-S 85mm f/1.4G. But, the 85 f/1.8 will certainly do as well. Maybe get the 85mm f/1.8, <em>and</em> a 105mm f/2.0 with the "extra" money.</p>

 

<blockquote>

<p>i have used 35mm f2 but i don't like it for portrait face or full body<br />for the face give me a strange effect and also for the body </p>

</blockquote>

<p>The 35mm on a DX body approximates a "normal" perspective, but I agree, there's too much forshortening (distortion) for my tastes to use it for head-and-shoulders shots. I'm much happier with either a 50mm or 85mm on a DX body for shooting people.</p>

[Andrew Garrard]

<p>Everyone (including Purple): can we please assume that everyone else was having a bad day, and chill a little? Let's stay on topic.</p>

<blockquote>I AM ASKING WHAT IS THE LENS THAT OFFER A BETTER PROPORTION

IN A FULL LENGHT IMAGE</blockquote>

 

<p>For what it's worth, I'm not quite sure I understand the question (I don't think that's Purple's English, which seems perfectly servicable and much better than my French). But I'll try to answer anyway. Stick with me, Purple, because this is going to start as though it's irrelevant...<br />

<br />

A photograph will appear distorted if you view it from a position relative to the image that is different from the position of the nodal point of the lens relative to the sensor. A DX camera has a 24mm x 16mm sensor. If you take a photograph with a 50mm lens and make a 24 inch by 16 inch print, the image will be undistorted if you look at it from 50 inches away (in line with the centre of the print). You could make a 12 inch by 8 inch print and view it from 25 inches away, and get the same perspective - so long as you scale all the dimensions by the same amount, the angle of view stays the same. If you use a 10mm lens, to get the same perspective as the camera, you would have to view a 24 inch by 16 inch print from just 10 inches away. A "normal" lens on DX is roughly 28-35mm; this roughly corresponds to looking at full page of a glossy magazine at a comfortable holding distance.<br />

<br />

If you view an image from a different perspective, you may or may not notice the distortion. If you look closely at an image taken with an extreme telephoto lens, you may find that subjects look "compressed" - with a human-sized subject, several people in a crowd may look almost the same size even if they're some distance apart. A single person may appear less "three-dimensional" - with a normal lens, you're used to seeing bits of the subject nearer to you and farther from you appear larger or smaller; with a long lens, the amount by which they're nearer or farther than the centre of the subject is less compared with your distance to the subject, so there's not so much of a cue to the eye that you're looking at something 3D.<br />

<br />

If you look, from a normal distance, at a portrait taken with a wide-angle lens, the edges of the image appear stretched out (remember - if you're viewing the image from the same perspective as the lens, the edges of the print will be at a shallow angle to you, which compresses them). Because such an image is typically taken from very close up (otherwise you get a tiny person in the middle of the frame), you're much closer to the nearer parts of the subject than to the farther parts of the subject, compared with your distance. I'm not sure I'm explaining that very clearly, so here's some numbers: if you're focussed on the subject's eyes, the tip of the subject's nose may be about an inch and a half closer to you than the eyes, and the ears may be three inches behind the eyes. If you're shooting with a wide angle from 36 inches (three feet) away, the nose is about 1.5/36 of the subject distance closer to you than the eyes, and the ears are about 3/36 farther away. If you shoot with a telephoto lens from 360 inches (30 feet) away, the nose is only 1.5/360 of the subject distance closer to you than the eyes, and the ears only 3/360 farther away; this is visible in perspective. With a wide-angle lens, parts of the subject nearer to you look much closer, and parts farther away look much farther away.<br />

<br />

The eye can accommodate a certain amount of distortion from a different field of view - particularly, looking at an image taken with a very long telephoto doesn't look too wrong - but extreme wide angles tend to look visibly distorted. Of course, you can do this deliberately, for artistic effect.<br />

<br />

What does this mean for an image? For the average portrait, a mild telephoto lens is the usual choice. There's no stretching of the edges of the image, there's still a bit of a 3D effect, the field of view is about how most people tend to think that people look (the "15 feet" claim matches the distance at which you'd perhaps start talking to a friend), and being a longer lens than normal means that the subject's nose doesn't look so large compared with their face, which is usually flattering. Telephoto lenses are also better at losing the background.<br />

<br />

On the other hand, a wide lens will stretch out the edges of the image (at a given distance from you, the edges of the subject are proportionately farther away than the middle compared with how they appear with a longer lens). Position the head near the middle of the frame so that it doesn't seem distorted, and you can use this effect to stretch out the legs to make them look longer (which, on ladies, is perhaps flattering). This seems to be what was done in the linked image, although the top of the image is cropped off (look at where the perspective lines are converging).<br />

<br />

What's a "better proportion"? It varies depending on what you're trying to do. If you don't want the subject to appear distorted and you still want a bit of 3D, something around 50-60mm is probably about right on DX. If you want to flatten out the subject farther to make noses look smaller and put less perspective in the subject, use a longer lens from farther away (the 400mm suggestion is not entirely facetious) - this also lets you lose the background more while keeping a reasonable depth of field. If you <i>want</i> distortion to use it to flatter the subject creatively - and you can also emphasise or de-emphasise parts of the body by shooting from different angles (e.g. upwards, from someone's feet, or down on their head from above) - then maybe a wide angle is what you need. But it won't look like a conventional portrait. I suspect you have to be a bit careful with unusual perspectives if, on a fashion shoot, you want to show off the clothing more than your creativity.<br />

<br />

I hope that helps, or at least gives you suggestions of things to try with a zoom lens before settling on primes. Note: I'm no fashion photographer; all I can say is that I've experimented with zooms, looked at enough photos to work out how they were done, and I like working out the geometry of scenes like this. I'd strongly suggest getting a feel for what you want before spending a lot of money on a big prime (or pro zoom) - that's why there's often frustration when people ask what lens they should buy. Everyone's vision is different.</p>

[vic_canberra]

<p>yes oshiro really appreciate your explanation<br>

as you have suggested to me i'll try an 85mm<br>

35mm have a lot of distortion for my tastes when i shot a face portrait and i have to stay too close <br>

i'm watching your photos and they are really extraordinary<br>

i have to learn so much<br>

:( to became a real photographer.<br>

You have undestand correctly what i love shooting, obviously i'm not able to do the work as a professionist but a tip about the correct equipment will aid me :)<br>

thank you</p>

<p> </p>

[vic_canberra]

<p>thank you andrew garrard you are very clear</p>

[vic_canberra]

<p>you have solved my doubts<br>

today i'm going to try lenses on a photography shop<br>

before i decide</p>

[studio460]

<p>purple purple said:</p>

<blockquote>

<p>i'm watching your photos and they are really extraordinary<br />i have to learn so much<br />:( to became a real photographer.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>If you're referring to my work, thank you! Don't be so hard on yourself. You went to art school, right? Then you already understand form, line, texture, and composition. You're way ahead of the game if you already have those subjects under your belt. Photography merely requires the technical translation of those concepts to an opto-mechanical, light-focusing device. You simply need to learn how those tools must be manipulated to execute your concepts.</p>

<p>The important parts: ideas and composition, you already know something about. The technical can be learned, and there are many resources available for that, both online, and in real life (community colleges, seminars, workshops, etc.). Also, both photo equipment manufacturers' websites (e.g., Photoflex), and retailers' sites (e.g., Adorama) have some excellent, free, online tutorials. And, don't forget, there's a <em>ton</em> of excellent photography books available at Amazon, whose internal search engine will bring up other relevant titles.</p>

<p>Bonne chance!</p>

[BelaMolnar]

<p>For Ralph Oshiro.<br /> <em> . . . . "The 35mm on a DX body approximates a "normal" perspective,"</em><br /> <strong><em>The 35mm lens on a DX body, still a 35mm lens perspective, and not, repeat, NOT a 50mm "normal lens perspective". It given you a crop of a 50mm angle ONLY, but the 35mm perspective distortion, still a 35 mm distortion, not a 50mm distortion.</em></strong></p>

[studio460]

<p>purple purple said:</p>

 

<blockquote>

<p>as you have suggested to me i'll try an 85mm</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Now remember, it's all about subject-to-camera distance. The sample shot in your original post was actually shot with a 35mm or 50mm lens--something a bit wider than normal. Now, the 85mm is a lovely lens for head-and-shoulders portraits, but you'll have to back up about 10 meters to frame a full-length subject for a horizontal frame, and about 8 meters for a vertical (I actually just tried this with an 85mm f/1.8 on a D90). Since the 85mm actually has a 127.5mm-equivalent, angle-of-view on an FX body, the 85mm on a DX body is actually quite a long lens. Again, an array of short- to short-telephotos should have you covered: 35mm, 50mm, 85mm.</p>

[studio460]

<p>Bela:</p>

<p>The cropped 35mm image circle on a DX sensor results in <em>approximately</em> the same amount of foreshortening as a 50mm lens on an FX body. I'm not splitting hairs here, just conveying general concepts.</p>

[jose_angel]

<p>Perspective is only distance dependant (in this case, camera to subject distance).<br /> Focal lenght doesn`t have anything to do with it. It doesn`t matter if 35, 50 or whatever.</p>

<p>Just to extend on what Ralph says, at a given distance, for a viewing angle similar to a 50mm lens on FX, a 35mm lens is needed on DX.</p>