Why Should We Use Longer Lens For Portrait Photography?

There are number of debates and confusions whether to use longer lens or shorter lens (also known as wide angle lens) to shoot portraits. After doing little bit of a research and reading few books, I have decided to write a blog about it. There are couple of factors to be considered while comparing a longer lens vs. a shorter lens for portrait photography. Let me explain them briefly and hope it will help you to find your answer as well.

1. Distortion

When you use a wide angle lens, you have to get closer to the subject to fill the frame. This closer distance to the subject creates distortion to the picture; things on the foreground look too big and things on the background look too small. If you are shooting people with shorter lens, you will get odd shape body of person like big flat face, long nose and other unstructured shape which you never think would come out as a result. Whereas if you use longer lens which requires farther distance to the subject minimize that distortion and things will have more realistic perspective. It also allows your portrait subject to sit comfortably as you maintain reasonable distance to the subject because of focal length.

2. Angle of view

Angle of view is simply how much you can see from view finder (or say how much you get inside frame) using different types of lenses. Wide angle lens or shorter lens will give you wide angle of view and hence you can see much more things on the background which can create cluttered images. But longer lens will give you narrow angle of view and you can see minimum of the background and foreground will be focused and almost entirely framed in the picture which helps to produce nice and clean shot.

3. Ease of use

Also if you are working with long zoom lens, you have another advantage to use it over fix length lens or shorter lens. It will allow you to shoot medium length shot to close head shot without moving front and back. You can use 50mm lens for general portraits but if you take closer headshot using this lens, you will end up getting little cartoonish character face than real face. We consider 85mm-135mm lenses ideal for portrait photography but you can also use 24-70mm f/2.8 or 70mm-200mm f/2.8 zoom lens but keep in mind their weight while using them for long time shooting.

Conclusion: Wide angle lens exaggerate things on your photographs. In fact wide angle lenses are not designed to use in portrait shot. They can be best use while shooting landscapes, interior where you want to capture much more things. Any lens between 85mm-135mm focal distance is considered the best lens for portrait photography which will keep your images clean, remove clutter from the images, keep nice distance with the subject, allow you to shoot multiple shot without moving front and back. And also creates nice shallow depth of field so that your foreground will be separated from the background producing pleasant image.

Manfrotto 175F-1 Spring Clamp With Flash Shoe

If you are looking for something that can hold your flash unit anywhere you go, Manfrotto 175F-1 spring clamp could be your best option. This clamp is a great product and should be a part of any strobist's basic lighting kit. It provides a great amount of versatility and can be attached to a light stand or clamped into anything. The ball head socket allows you to position your flash in any position you like, allowing you to create your shot however you envision it. It takes only few seconds to clamp it onto to a piece of furniture without fear of marring a surface due to the small rubber feet built into the clamp.

Manfrotto 175F-1 spring clamp

It is very handy for mounting the flash units like SB-600 or SB-800 in places where you can't use the light stand. It clamps very well and it's secure. The plastic cold shoe fits the strobe nice and sung so that you don't have to worry about the strobe falling out. The clamp end is strong and grips things very well. It also has a standard light stand stud on it and a clamp as well to accept a stud from the light stand. It can hold up to 4.41 lbs and rotates 360 degree. The clamp is made up of aluminum and steel and it weighs about 0.73 lbs.

Manfrotto brand is known for the quality products. I own several products from Manfrotto like 055XPROB pro tripod, spring clamp, 498RC2 ball head. They are excellent quality products and I love them. Their build quality is extremely strong and sturdy. Their products are little expensive than what you get in a regular market (non-brand item) but worth every penny and it will pay you off in the future.

CMOS Sensor Vs CCD Sensor

When you go shopping for a digital camera, you have to deal with lots of technical terminology and the specification about the camera. And most of the times, these terminology and specifications set the price and the quality of the camera. When you are comparing various digital cameras, even within same brand, you will notice some of the features are available in one camera model and not in another one. But before you compare different bodies based on these technical terms, I think it would be better to learn about these terminology first and I am here today to help you understand the differences between CMOS and CCD sensor type used in camera body. Whether it's a digital camera or a conventional film camera, they share same basic principle which is collecting the lights (reflecting from the subject) which travels through the lens and focus them on the digital sensor or film inside the camera body. Only the difference is that the traditional film camera uses light sensitive films to record the image whereas digital camera uses digital sensor. When you are using a film camera, you have to further process the image using chemicals to get the final image but in case of digital camera, when light hits the digital sensor, it will be converted to electrons (photons) and camera software processes them instantly inside the camera and gives the results.

The digital light sensor is divided up into many small arrays of the receptor cells. Every receptor in the array is equivalent to one pixel and it is the pixels that create an image. More pixels we have, better picture quality we get because of the wide spectrum of lights hitting on the entire sensor. One simplified way to think about the sensor used in a digital camera is to think of it as having a 2-D array of thousands or millions of tiny solar cells, each of which transforms the light from one small portion of the image into electrons. Both CMOS and CCD devices perform this task using varieties of technology.

CMOS Vs. CCD

Today, most of the digital cameras use either a CMOS image sensor or a CCD sensor. Both types of sensors accomplish the same task of capturing the light and converting it into an electrical signal.

A CMOS (Complimentary metal-oxide semiconductor) chip is a type of active pixel sensor made using the CMOS semiconductor process. Extra circuitry next to each photo sensor converts the light energy into a voltage. Additional circuitry on the chip may be included to convert the voltage into digital data.

A CCD (Charged-couple device) is an analog device. When light strikes the chip, it is held as a small electrical charge in each photo sensor. The charges are then converted into voltage one pixel at a time as they are read from the chip. Additional circuitry in the camera converts the voltage into digital information.

FOVEON F7 X3 CMOS SENSOR

CMOS sensors are cheaper and easier to manufacture than the CCD chips and have a great battery life. Also, they can be fabricated on just about any standard silicon production line. This is one of the key reasons behind the falling prices of digital cameras recently. Generally speaking, digital cameras that use CMOS chips are usually lighter than their CCD counterparts. However, CMOS chips do have their drawbacks as they are less sensitive to the lights and more susceptible to the digital noise, whereas CCD sensors create high-quality and low-noise images. CMOS sensor traditionally consumes little power whereas CCD sensor uses more power to operate. It consumes as much as 100 times more power than an equivalent CMOS sensor. Once upon a time, digital cameras utilizing CMOS were regarded inferior in terms of the image quality, but today however, many popular digital cameras and video cameras are increasing in popularity as CMOS technology improves. For example, Foveon's new X3 image sensor, a CMOS sensor, which is capable of recording all three colors (red, green and blue) at every cell. CMOS technology allows other circuitry to be incorporated into the same chips, making them useful to a manufacturer for the use in other electronic applications.

Conclusion:  CCD sensors tend to be used in cameras that focus on high-quality images with lots of pixels and excellent light sensitivity. CMOS sensors traditionally have lower image quality, lower resolution and lower sensitivity to the lights but usually they are less expensive and have a great battery life. CMOS sensors are now improving to the point where they can compare with CCD devices in some applications.