Let's get this out of the way first: if you are worried about the subjective amount of bokeh you can get in a portrait—that is, you attach status to how much can be out of the depth-of-field (DoF): then you should shoot portraits with a 300mm ƒ/2.8 or whatever its angle-of-view equivalent is for your camera. This was a standard for professional model shoots decades ago. You do have to shout at your model to communicate, because she or he will be a long way away from you, especially if you're getting more than a tight headshot. But that's the way to blast the background into nothing but blurriness.
So now we've dispatched that issue. I don't want to get into arguments with people who believe in the imaginary concept of relative aperture.
Pictorialist portrait, from the book Quiet Opposition: Russian
Pictorialism 1900–1930s, courtesy Bronze Horseman Books
And of course there is no such thing as a "perfect" portrait lens. Well, amend that: there might be for any given particular photographer. In the age of pictorialism, portrait photographers wanted soft lenses that had exceptionally low resolution and were quite soft and blurry; many were made (mostly these were view camera lenses), and when a photographer found one they liked, that was just right, they often prized it greatly and sometimes wouldn't even reveal its make and model, lest competitors copy them and use the same lens.
Wire-sharp
That style isn't popular any more. However, one thing that's widely misunderstood these days is that a super-sharp, high-resolving lens is not necessarily the lens you want for portraits. "Uncle Arthur" Kramer, the ace advertising man who was by avocation the in-house lens guru for the now long-gone Modern Photography magazine, called such lenses "hard sharp and wire-sharp" in one article I recall. By wire-sharp he meant that it cut like barbed wire. Another friend uses two words to describe such lenses: analytical and clinical. I've sometimes termed them forensic, meaning (apologies if this is too graphic) that they flay their subject open to minute examination like a corpse on the autopsy slab.
What's a portrait but a sympathetic presentation of a person's appearance? When people go on dates, they stereotypically go to cozy little out-of-the way restaurants where the music is soft and the lights are low. They might dress nicely and make sure their hair looks nice. The woman might wear makeup. When you strive to present yourself favorably to someone you don't know very well, you don't go out of the way to point out your bloodshot eyes or bad skin or the texture of your makeup.
Is this creating an illusion? Maybe, but consider blemishes: a pimple is a prominent but transitory feature of a face. It's not inherent to the way a face looks. I believe that our minds naturally downplay such transitory features for the simple reason that we instinctively know they're not dependable as markers of recognition. But wire-sharp lenses reveal all these things: the texture of makeup, the pores of your skin, the blood vessels in your eye. On a date, you wouldn't want to blast the other person with the hard light of the interrogation room or see them they way they look when they roll out of bed with a hangover, would you?
In search of...less good lenses?!
In the 1980s, Nikon introduced a small series of budget lenses called Series E to go with the tiny EM beginner's camera. To Nikon's embarrassment, professional photographers began snapping up the simple 2X 75mm–150mm Series E zoom. The reason was simple: the lens had a smooth, pleasant look that made models look great. (Those were the days before Photoshop, of course.) It's not that it was unsharp, but it wasn't forensic. Now, cinematographers are snapping up old film lenses because new megadollar cinema lenses are too unforgiving. Perfection is appealing but not interesting.
Years ago I tried the Pentax 55mm ƒ/1.4 DA lens. It's an APS-C lens with an angle-of-view equivalence of 82.5mm in 135 terms. I didn't like it. I use lenses in that focal-length range for portraits, and this lens is too sharp for me. Hard sharp. Wire sharp. Clinical. Analytical. I found myself struggling to find ways in Photoshop to soften its pitiless gaze.
Lensmakers don't make portrait lenses these days, if you ask me. We're a culture of extremes: if something is good, more of it must be better. Recently I heard that people are beginning to complain that on American pickup trucks (which, if you haven't been paying attention, have gotten absolutely huge), the bed height has gotten so high that they're getting inconvenient to load. But hey, they're mas macho. And besides, the average pickup owner only puts a payload in the back four times a year anyway. Some pickup owners put a cover over the cargo bed and never take it off. Accordingly, the few "soft focus" lenses that exist aren't just lenses with the edge taken off, with a little more smoothness. They've got to be extreme. If a little soft focus is good, then a whole lot must be better. So these lenses tend to fish-slap you across the face with their blatant unsharpness.
That's not it.
Ordinary commercial portraits from the 1910s struck a beautiful balance between not sharp enough and too sharp. We don't have portrait lenses this "good" today.
To make a good portrait lens would require finding the right balance in the middle: neither too sharp nor blurry. But, balance? Moderation? Subtlety? That is not the way current culture understands anything. Furthermore, a lens deliberately made for portraits would not be corrected for high performance wide open—it would be the other way around. It would deliberately have lower performance at the widest apertures, with progressively more sharpness as you stop down to the optimum aperture. That would give the photographer some control, a way to choose the level of performance needed in different situations. The old FA* 85mm ƒ/1.4 Pentax lens was excellent in this respect. Soft wide open with some visible aberrations, perfect for portraits at ƒ/2, and uniformly very sharp with minimal vignetting by the optimum aperture of ƒ/8. Of course now we don't care about vignetting because it's so easily addressed in software.
What's much better for pictures of people than that DA 55mm ƒ/1.4? Well, for me anyway: Pentax's 70mm DA ƒ/2.4 Limited "pancake" short telephoto.
A 105mm ƒ/2.5 Nikkor for today
One of the most famous Nikkors in Nikon's history was the classic 105mm ƒ/2.5. It has such a long and involved history, starting with the original Nikkor-P Sonnar-type rangefinder lens designed by Zenji Wakimoto and announced in 1953, that this post is not long enough even to sketch the outlines of it. In 1971 the lens was redesigned by Wakimoto-san's protegé Yoshiyuki Shimizu. It was one of the legendary Nikkors that made the company's name.
The Pentax 70mm ƒ/2.4 has the same angle of view on APS-C cameras and virtually the same aperture, and might be thought of as a lens in the spirit of that famous Nikkor for portraits. While plenty sharp, it also has a subtle smoothness, one might very subjectively say "a gentle touch," as well as non-jarring bokeh, that makes it better than many other lenses for portraits.
Perfect? No. Hard to argue that, anyway. There's no such thing, and there's not even a market for it because the flood of people who have come into the hobby in recent years are still uncritically in thrall to our cultural idea that more technical perfection in lenses is always better.
But it's the people lens I'd choose if I were getting a Pentax K-3 Mark III.
Mike
Book o' this Week:
Black in White America 1963–1965 by Leonard Freed, a new reprint of this classic from the Civil Rights era. I got to meet Leonard Freed once. <—This is a portal to Amazon; also available at the Book Depository for global delivery with free shipping.
Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
William Lewis: "This balance was best achieved in the old days with the big simple Tessars and it is why I dearly love my Nikkor 45mm ƒ/2.8 AI-P. It's a simple Tessar pancake and it is exquisite for what it is, just as they were at the turn of the century."
Mike replies: I might do the same if only I could focus them. Although my love affair was with the Contax version.
Al C.: "Still have my 105mm ƒ/2.5 Nikkor, the only Nikon lens I have kept. All the pics of my young daughter were taken with it. Looking at them now, the melted-butter background really is special. On the other hand, I'm embarrassed to see how often her face, too, is soft—not by artistic intent, but from missed focus."
Mike replies: That's actually a long-forgotten old photographer's trick. Just throw it slightly out of focus. Most people are none the wiser. I've never done it though because I notice and it bugs me too much.
David Dyer-Bennet: "Old portraits often give me a kind of eye-strain as I look at them—they're violating my visual expectations enough that I try really hard to see more detail, I guess. They feel detailed but anything I look at closely goes soft on me. It's kind of unsettling."
Crabby Umbo (partial comment): "I remember testing an 85mm Canon FD breach-lock (first series, multi-coated, for my old Canon FTb) with a model pal, and after looking at the transparencies, she said: "...don't ever use that lens on me again...." It was painfully sharp."
Not THAT Ross Cameron: "On a slight tangent, I’d suggest that there is growing interest in film-era lenses, in part thanks to most manufacturers moving to mirrorless, plus new tech like IBIS and various focus assist tools (zebra stripes etc), that help with the critical focusing of manual focus lenses. I’ve been slowly adding to my (ahem) 'collection' of Nikkor AI-S lenses (repeat three times to self, I am not a lens collector), over recent years, and saw the prices of that 105mm ƒ/2.5 double over the Christmas period. Places like KEH have been turning them over relatively quickly.
"I managed to pick up the 105mm P C Auto version, AI converted—just waiting for it to arrive in the mail. I don’t know if it’s part hipster, part exploration, part videographers etc., but whatever it is, used prices of the older Nikkors are going up."
Patrick Pope: "In a not-dissimilar way the megapixel race has some of the same issue. Photographing portraits on a 45+ megapixel camera can, depending on the portrait coverage, render every pore and blemish in startling detail. Moreover I've found many of the newer sensors give a more analytical rendering devoid of character. I much prefer the overall look of my old Nikon D3 images to the more technically correct images from the D850, even when the same lens is used on both.
"It's all a matter of taste, of course, but I feel it covers a similar vein as the topic of over-sharp lenses."
antipattern: "I really like the DA 70mm, even on full frame. It is tiny and has a magical rendering, and I agree—it is great for portraits."
Stephen S. Mack: "I guess my Barnack Leica Summarit ƒ/1.5 lens with the customary and obligatory careless cleaning marks might qualify as a portrait lens if you're looking for softness. I got the camera and lens about a month ago, and even though I cringe when I see the lens in certain kinds of light, it's still fun for me."
Mike replies: Yes, I've seen some beautiful work with that lens.
Thomas Walsh: "Honestly, if I never heard the word 'sharp' again in a photographic context that would be just fine."
Yonatan Katznelson (partial comment): "I think that the Pentax FA 77mm ƒ/1.8 has the quality you speak of, perhaps even more so than the 70mm ƒ/2.4...as I expect you will soon hear from a bevy of Pentaxians."
