Which lens for portraiture?

qquake

qquake

Member
Hi All,

I take a lot of outdoor portraits, and would like to start taking some indoor. I am currently using a Pentax K200D, with a Sigma 28-105mm f2.8-4 lens. I'd like to get a faster lens. I'm looking at either a Pentax 50mm f1.4 prime, or a Sigma 24-70mm f2.8 zoom. The Sigma maintains the f2.8 aperture throughout its zoom range. Which one do you think would be better for indoor portraits and why? I like the versatility of a zoom lens, but I also like the speed and image quality of the prime. Any thoughts, comments, and experiences are welcome. Thanks!
 
I don't like 50mm lenses for portrait work, they seem to yield the big nose effect too often for my style of shooting.

The 24-70mm lens, especially the Sigma is a great lens if you can deal with the slow auto focus and the noise (it is not an HSM lens). I used to use one of these exclusively for my event shooting before replacing it with the Nikon 17-55mm f/2.8.

The best portrait lens I have ever used is a Nikon 85mm f/1.4

That being said, if you are shooting on a Pentax and if you are looking for something that will yield somewhat more versatile results and are looking at third party lenses then I would recommend looking at something like the Sigma 70-210 f/2.8 zoom lens. This is a little soft wide open, in my experience, but it is a nice solid lens that will allow for some nice portraits. If you step down to around f/5.6 you should be at critical sharpness for those other situations.

Beyond this Sigma suggestion I do not know enough about other 3rd party lenses or the Pentax brand to make a stronger suggestion. Horse shoots Pentax, I believe, or www.dpreview.com has an excellent Pentax section where you might find more users to suggest alternate 1st party ideas.
 
Hi Jeremy,

Thanks for your response. I'm curious, though, about the big nose effect. With the sensor size in my camera, a 50mm lens is effectively 75mm. Isn't that long enough to eliminate the facial features distortion?
 
qquake said:
Hi Jeremy,

Thanks for your response. I'm curious, though, about the big nose effect. With the sensor size in my camera, a 50mm lens is effectively 75mm. Isn't that long enough to eliminate the facial features distortion?
Click to expand...

No. The crop factor on your camera doesn't change the properties of the lens but it rather just crops the edges. Think about it like if you shot something with a wide angle lens in HD. Then cropped it to SD but used just the middle portion of the frame. it wouldn't change the fact that it's a wide angle lens but you don't notice the distortion as much on the edges
 
I have never really noticed any curvature or distortion in the 50mm F1.8. It is a great lens for $109. An 85mm f1.4 is $1024 dollars, and the F1.8 runs $400 dollars. Hmm...which one to get. No regular person would ever notice this nose effect. Im not quite sure I have ever heard of this until you said something! If you can please post some examples of the two side by side?! I would like to see this.
 
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