The best portrait lens is a fast aperture prime that gives you nice shallow depth of field effects to help emphasise your subject. But not just any prime lens. Any photographer will tell you that the best lens for portraits is an 85mm fixed focal length lens, and sometimes a 50mm.
For portraiture with full-frame camera bodies, the winning formula is a prime lens with a focal length of around 85mm and a fast aperture rating, typically of f/1.4 to f/1.8. The 85mm focal length enables you to capture head and shoulders or half-length portraits from a comfortable distance, so you’re not crowding your subject but are still close enough to give directions.
Naturally, it’s a different situation if you’re shooting on a crop-sensor camera body. If you shoot with an APS-C format or Micro Four Thirds sensor camera, you’ll want a shorter focal length due to their sensors’ crop factor. In this case, a 50mm ‘standard prime’ will give an ‘effective’ focal length of 75mm on APS-C format bodies (80mm for Canon), while the 2.0x crop factor of Micro Four Thirds gives a 42.5mm lens the same reach as an 85mm lens in full-frame terms.
The best lens for portraits will also have what they call a ‘fast’ aperture, or a low f stop value. This means you can shoot with the aperture wide open and have more control over depth of field.
Optical quality should deliver good sharpness and clarity, while wide apertures enable a shallow depth of field so you can blur the background and focus all the attention on the person your photographing.
Let’s take a look at the best portrait lenses for shooting with Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm and Micro Four Thirds cameras, and the best value options to suit a tighter budget.
So let’s take a look at the best portrait lenses in order of mount type…
