Quote:
Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce
A 70mm lens is the preferred "portrait lens", which seem counter intuitive. But if you think about it, a portrait is usually head and shoulders, think school pictures, without the camera being right in the subjects face. Try it with your friend, seeing how close you have to be to get the same school picture with the 50mm and 70mm.
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maybe weighing in late, but another reason for a longer focal length lens for portraits is less distortion. A 135 is also a nice portrait lens.
The ideal (in my opinion) beginner's phalanx of lenses would be a 35mm, roughly equivalent to our field of vision when scanning a scene, a 70 to 135 zoom which somewhat replicates what we see when we focus on things that are distant. This has to do more with what we edit out in our brains and not what our eyes actually see:
Normal lens