Portrait photography tips?

skip the 17-40. There's a couple perspective shots you could do, or more dramatic shots of people and their surroundings, but it's generally a bad idea to shoot portraits of people with wider lenses as it will distort the proportions of their bodies - and if you are shooting photos from the midriff up it will distort faces and make them look odd.

Most people that are shooting headshots and the like will use something 80mm+ on a full frame, which your 50 will work for assuming you are using a crop sensor cam (forgot if you mentioned that). Don't get into the habit of shooting everything f1.8 - there's a place for that for sure, but it's not every shot you take. Even at 1.8 you may cream out your background so much that it's just a colorful blob, and that's not always great.

Experiment with it, shoot a bunch, edit your best shots and then decide how they could be better. Then shoot some more with notes!

Alright I'll ditch the 17-40.

The 50mm is an fd. So the adapter element adds an x1.2 crop and I am on a crop sensor. So it would should like a 100mm on a full frame. And I try to avoid stopping down to 1.8 even in low light cus the lens soften up. Given ideal conditions, I'd want to shoot at f/4-5.6 I think.

Thanks for the advice!

definitely use your 70-200! I like shooting anywhere between 70-135 for portraits on a full frame.

some examples of portraits i've done:

@102mm



@80mm



again @80mm

Anyone know much about retouching in photoshop? Or can you do it in lightroom?

Just uploaded some portrait photos from today on my flicker (check the sig). Feel free to critique them. All was shot on a 70-200

if the person / person(s) you are shooting have a very strong and definitive personalities it seems to help incorporating that into the picture in some way. That will sometimes make the connection between lens & subject more natural and comfortable.

depends on how much retouching you want to do. you can clone/mask/heal in lightroom. That takes care of zits and such. if you want significant skin smoothing, heavy fixing/altering, then either photoshop or a LR plugin.