Portrait was taken with a 20 mm focal length wide-angle lens.
Portrait made with 150 mm telephoto lens.

Here’s a quick way to really make a difference in the quality of the portraits you make:

Our choice of lens not only influences how wide a view we might be able to cover, or how easily we can fill the frame with a distant subject, but it also determines the quality of perspective in our photographs. Wide-angle lenses increase the degree of the angles of perspective in a photograph, while longer lenses, in the telephoto range, tend to flatten those angles. So what does this mean for photo-portraiture?

Here are a couple of examples. The first was made with a wide-angle lens with a 20 mm focal length; the second with a 150 mm telephoto lens. The choice (to me at least) appears obvious. Here’s why:

Wide-angle lenses, because of their exaggerated perspective, tend to make everything closest to the camera appear bigger, while doing the opposite with things farther away. What’s the closest thing to the camera in most traditional portraits? The nose! Making the nose bigger, as you might guess, is not the most becoming way to portray a subject. Long focal length lenses, on the other hand, compress the angles of perspective, making everything in an image appear more two-dimensional. That two-dimensional quality happens to be much more flattering in people photographs—prominent features are subdued and the flat perspective imparts a pictorial quality most people find appealing. Fashion photographers realize this, and most of the portraits they make, even the full-length portraits, are made with long lenses.

Both images © Richard Maack

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