What is The Best Canon Portrait Lens?
Couple Portrait
Portraiture is one of the most popular photography applications and one of the first that photographers purchase a dedicated lens for. Adding a dedicated portrait lens like the popular Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II or a multipurpose lens that can be utilized for portraits and several other applications like the Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L, will enhance your potential and make your images shine. To find the best Canon portrait lens, you need to look toward professionals who specialize in portraiture while keeping in mind your own goals, abilities and budget.
Professional portrait photographers generally look for a few specific features in a portrait lens. Many recommend a focal length between 50-100mm for portraiture. This focal length accomplishes several things. First, you do not want to be too close to your subject. While you can take portraits with a wide lens or a normal lens, you may get too close to your subject.
Generally, the result of being too close is the unpleasant exaggeration of facial features. Additionally, you do not want to be too far away, so a long focal length is out of the question. Next, unless you utilize a background, you want to create a good background blur effect. Generally, lenses with longer focal lengths blur out backgrounds better. To this effect, you want to look for a lens with a wide maximum aperture.
A wider aperture (lower f-stop number) helps when creating background blur. Moreover, a wide aperture will help produce better photos indoors or in low light conditions. Finally, the best Canon portrait lenses must be able to produce sharp, high quality images. Taking these factors into account, recommending a single Canon portrait lens as the absolute best is nearly out of the question. Depending on your own photographic style you may choose a different lens. If you are looking for a lens that you can use for a variety of applications in addition to portraiture, you should consider the Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM standard zoom lens. At f/2.8 this lens is fast enough for most every light condition, produces great background blur outs, and utilizes the best Canon optical elements for ideal sharpness and contrast.
If you like to take portraits at a longer focal length, are looking to expand into action or sports photography, and already have a quality all-purpose lens, you might consider the popular Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II telephoto zoom lens as the best Canon portrait lens. The use of this telephoto as a portrait lens is gaining serious popularity in the professional photography community. It has an excellent reputation as an all-purpose action lens that utilizes “L series” glass, image stabilization technology and a fast maximum aperture.
If you are interested in macro photography then the Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro lenso could be a great choice, because apart from being voted the best macro lens on the market, this lens is also known to be a fantastic portrait lens due to its quality glass, wide aperture and 100mm focal length.
Finally you should also consider a prime fixed focal lengt lens like the Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II. These lense a very affordable, but they deliver incredibly sharp photos and the 50mm focal length makes it perfect for studio style portraits.
