Certain lenses can highlight your subject in the best possible way. This helpful video tutorial compares various focal lengths, from super wide-angle to telephoto, showing how each affects your subject's appearance.
Coming to you from Karl Taylor with Visual Education, this enlightening video takes you through a series of test shots using different lenses while keeping the model’s head the same size in each shot. The first shot, taken with an 85mm lens, represents how we typically perceive people in photos. This focal length is ideal for flattering portraits. As you move to other extremes, either wide angle or telephoto, the features of the subject change dramatically. The changes occur because you must adjust the camera's position to maintain the same subject size, affecting the perceived facial features.
Starting with a 16mm lens, Taylor shows the extreme distortion it creates. The nose appears larger, and the overall look is far from flattering. While a 16mm lens can be useful for full-length fashion shots where slight distortion adds an artistic effect, it’s not suitable for close-up portraits.
Next, the focal length was adjusted to 24mm. Although more recognizable, it still introduces considerable distortion, making it unflattering for portraits. Moving to 35mm, the subject starts looking more natural, but subtle distortions remain. The 50mm lens, traditionally a standard lens, brings a more realistic and believable look. However, it's still not as flattering as longer focal lengths.
When using an 85mm lens, the image looks much more lifelike and flattering. Taylor continues to increase the focal length, moving to 100mm, 135mm, and even up to 200mm.
The main takeaway is clear: wide angle lenses like 16mm and 24mm exaggerate features and distort the face, making them unsuitable for portraits. As you move towards 50mm and longer, the images become more flattering, with 85mm being particularly ideal. Longer focal lengths, while flattering up to a point, can make subjects appear heavier. Understanding these effects helps you make informed lens choices. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Taylor.
In my opinion the best looking lens in this scenario is the 400. For headshots I usually settle for 200 as my 400 is a 2.8 which is a little cumbersome.
For me:
28-35 for editorial. 50-85 for full body shots. 135 for half body shots. 200 for head and shoulder shots. 300-400 for headshots.
I will vary from this for three reasons. (1) I don't have the right lens on my. (2) I want to get more compression on the background so I might go longer. Or I want to remove unwanted elements from the background and a longer focal length is the only way to do it.
the Canon EF 85mm f1.2L ii ( the very first lens ) seems to render more nicely than the EF 70-200 f2.8L ii or iii at 85mm, so it may not be simply the focal length but the characteristics of the individual lenses.
the images from the EF 70-200mm f2.8L zoom seem to be a bit flat, i.e. the face seems to be less three dimensional.