Close up lenses for portraits?

[christy_garrett]

<p>I recently bought a Minolta Autocord and was wondering which Rolleinar lens is best for portraits? I am terrible at guessing distances, but I know that the Autocord doesn't focus nearly close enough for many of the pictures I want to take. I can't decide if I should get 1 or 2. Or should I just get both? What do you recommend?</p>

[d_purdy]

<p>On a Rollei the #1 will get you waist up for a small child. A #2 will get you head and shoulders.<br>

There will be some distortion from using close up lenses, as well as some parallax problems to consider. Especially with closest focus on the #2 or if you get a #3 for face shots. You can do very wonderful intimate feeling portraits being up close to your subject like that.<br>

Dennis</p>

[dave_redmann]

<p>IMOPO (some will disagree) the answer is not close-up lenses, because portraits taken with the subject much closer than about 6 ft / 1.8 m from the camera often start to look weird (search "perspective distortion"; think big nose and small ears). At that distance, the Autocord's field of view will be about 4.5 x 4.5 ft (1.4 x 1.4 m), which means half-length portraits for adults or maybe standing portraits for small children. If you want head-and-shoulders portraits, or tight head shots, with an inexpensive but high quality medium format film camera, I suggest looking for a Mamiya M645 1000s with a 150mm or 210mm lens, respectively.</p>

<p>Rolleiflex TLR's were available with 135mm and 150mm lenses for portraits. The old ones are rare, and both the old ones and the newer ones are expensive. But to serious portrait photographers, that was a better option than a close-up lens.</p>

 

[carl_neilson]

<p>I concur with the others. I used Rolleinars on my Rolleicord for close portraits once. The picture quality didn't suffer, and the parralax correction worked fine, but the results were a little off-putting, with a touch of wide-angle type distortion.</p>