Good portraits are one of the hardest things to shoot with your camera’s kit lens. No matter how hard you try, you just won’t be able to get the images from an 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 lens to look like the kind of portraits that you see in magazines or online.
This is because the maximum aperture of your kit lens is just too narrow to get the shallow depth of field needed to blur the background to nothing. You need something a little more specialized. Let’s look at what makes a good portrait lens and a few affordable options.
What You Want in a Portrait Lens
Portraits are about one thing: flattering your model. No one wants a photo where they look like a bulldog with its head out a car window. When you’re shooting portraits, you want to use a lens that is going to make your subject look good, or more realistically, not make them look bad. These lenses tend to have certain characteristics.
Focal Length and Portraits
Wide angle lenses are totally out, at least for traditional portraits. Look at the photo below. This was shot as a selfie with a 17mm lens on a full frame camera. I look like something out of a Guillermo del Toro film.
Instead, you want something in the normal focal length range—40-58mm on a full-frame camera, 28mm-36mm on a crop sensor camera—or the short telephoto range—70-105mm on a full-frame camera, 50-70mm on a crop sensor camera. At these focal ranges there will either be no distortion, or what little distortion there is will actually make your model look good.
You can use a longer telephoto if you have one available, but to get a head shot with a 200mm lens, you have to stand about 30…
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