After testing more than 800 lenses, Christopher Frost has narrowed his personal favorites for portrait work down to three. The picks span a wild range of price points and design philosophies, which makes the list genuinely worth paying attention to.
Coming to you from Christopher Frost, this candid video walks through Frost's three personal favorite portrait lenses, starting with a wild card: the Lomography Petzval 55mm f/1.7 Mark II. What makes it unusual is the bokeh control ring, which lets you dial in anything from soft, conventional blur to dramatically swirly out-of-focus backgrounds. It's a full frame lens, manual focus only, and Frost is clear that sharpness is reserved for whatever is centered in the frame. The gold-colored build alone tends to draw attention on a shoot.
In second place is the Sigma 135mm f/1.4 DG HSM Art, which Frost calls one of the most impressive lenses he's tested. At 135mm and f/1.4, background separation is extreme, even when shooting a subject from a considerable distance. Frost notes the autofocus is fast enough for sports, which tells you something about how seriously this lens is engineered. It currently holds the distinction of being the brightest aperture autofocus 135mm lens available.
Before revealing his top pick, Frost runs through a handful of honorable mentions that are worth knowing about. The Nikon Z 135mm f/1.8 S Plena and Fujifilm XF 90mm f/2 R LM WR both project a larger image circle than the sensor requires, which reduces the cat's-eye bokeh distortion that shows up in the corners of wide-aperture shots. Frost also mentions the Fujifilm GF 110mm f/2 R LM WR for medium format, capable of 100-megapixel portraits, though he acknowledges the price puts it out of reach for most. At the far end of the spectrum, he somehow managed to shoot portraits of his wife with a Canon RF 1200mm f/8 L IS USM, a lens that retails around $22,700 and produces background compression that borders on absurd. He also gives a nod to the Sony FE 70-200mm f/2 GM OSS as the top choice if zoom range matters to you.
His number one pick is the Canon RF 85mm f/1.2L USM DS. The "DS" stands for defocus smoothing, referring to an apodization filter inside the lens that softens bokeh highlights beyond what the aperture alone can do. Frost has settled on 85mm as his preferred focal length for portraits because it emphasizes the subject without compressing the background into nothing, and f/1.2 gives him the light-gathering and subject separation he wants. Whether the ultra-smooth bokeh this lens produces is your thing or not is personal, but Frost makes clear it's exactly what he's after. Check out the video above for the full breakdown from Frost.
2 Comments
Fancy large-aperture and expensive portrait lenses are fascinating, no doubt, but it's probably also worth noting that Steve McCurry's "Afghan Girl" and the vast majority of other great examples of portrait photography were in fact shot with relatively humble and inexpensive lenses, which were lightweight enough to carry and whose users knew them well enough to make them shine and produce outstanding work with them.