Maximum Aperture
As far as portrait photographers are concerned, one of the cruelest tricks of nature is that often the nicest looking light is also the weakest light (think the exquisite pale softness of the “blue hour”).
This means that in order to take advantage of some of the best lighting conditions for portraiture, you will do well to invest in lenses with a fairly fast maximum aperture.
Similarly, portraiture is about people.
In fact usually just one person.
This means that as a portrait photographer you will often want to put all emphasis on your main subject.
One way of achieving this is to create a shallow depth of field by using a wider aperture setting.
While of course other factors beyond aperture help to determine depth of field, the fact is that the wider the maximum aperture available to you, the shallower the depth of field you will be able to achieve.
Shooting at f/5.6 on a telephoto lens will provide a fairly shallow depth of field, but the same aperture on a 50mm lens will leave a lot of recognizable (and therefore potentially distracting) information in the background.
Again then, a faster maximum aperture can be very useful for portraiture.
It’s important not to go overboard with this mantra though.
There’s usefully fast maximum aperture, and then there’s ridiculously fast maximum aperture.
Before spending thousands of dollars on Nikon’s incredible 58mm f/0.95 S Noct lens (above), ask yourself whether it would really be worth investing all this money when in most cases the end result is likely to be photos with such a shallow depth of field that literally nothing but the person’s eyeballs are in focus.
That may look fine on your smartphone, but an image so devoid of sharp detail may not hold anyone’s attention for long when viewed much bigger than this.
True, standing a little further back for a full length portrait could produce good results, with both the foreground and background fully blown out.
But once again, there’s a limit to how much people want to look at little more than a few abstract swirls of color.
Of course, viewers of portraiture don’t expect the same degree of detail as with, say, a landscape photo.
Nonetheless, there does need to be somewhere sharp for them to alight their gaze; a few islands of terra firma in an otherwise swirling sea of buttery bokeh.
The eyes may be “windows of the soul,” but if all a portrait shows in any clarity is a pair of eyes, the image is unlikely to keep an audience captivated for any amount of time.
In short, fast glass certainly has its advantages for portraiture, but there comes a point at which being able to shoot at a wider aperture may be of little practical use.
Precisely which point that is for you will depend on your own personal tastes, but for most people it’s likely to be around f/2 – give or take a stop.
Bokeh
Bokeh refers to the way in which a lens renders the out of focus areas of a photograph. Some lenses will reduce backgrounds to a smooth and highly attractive swirl; while others will capture out of focus details in a much busier and more distracting manner.
As we’ve just noted, portraits are often shot at wide aperture settings of f/2.8 and beyond.
But even shooting shutdown to f/4, vast portions of the photo will probably be out of focus.
And with such large swathes of a portrait likely to be blurred, clearly it’s important that these areas look good.
For this reason, lenses that produce attractive bokeh are usually highly valued for portraiture.
The technical considerations that contribute to attractive bokeh are numerous.
However, merely studying the specifications of a particular lens will give you little insight into the kind of bokeh it’s capable of producing.
In any case, bokeh is a somewhat subjective concept, and what pleases one viewer may irritate another. That being the case, the only test that matters is your eyes; either you like the results or you don’t. The important thing is not to get too hung up about bokeh. “Bad” bokeh can certainly be distracting and detract from an otherwise good photo, but even the world’s most beautiful bokeh will not make a boring photo interesting.
Focusing
A couple of the portrait lenses for Nikon Z-series cameras that we look at here lack autofocus.
If this were not a guide to portrait lenses, but one about, say, lenses for sports or documentary photography, a lack of AF capabilities would be enough to disqualify these particular models from our list.
But there are various ways of approaching portrait photography – some fast some slow – and not everybody prefers autofocus to manual control.
For photographers who work quietly, purposefully, and intensely, manual focus might be the best solution. If that’s you, be sure to try out the lens before purchasing.
Manual operation can vary massively between lenses, with some offering nicely grippy focus rings with very responsive, smooth action, and others tending to lag or provide too much resistance.
Normally you would also do well to check if the lens in question offers genuine manual focusing or instead “focus-by-wire” operation; as many find the latter system to be less reactive.
As it is though, the Z-mount lenses that use the focus-by-wire system actually perform exceptionally well in this area, and for portrait photography at least, they are unlikely to cause any inconvenience.
Meanwhile, photographers looking to create somewhat more animated and candid portraits will likely consider autofocus essential.
In this case, face- or eye-recognition AF is a must.
Those who also plan on shooting video will need the focus motors to be silent, and basically everyone will want AF operation to be fast and accurate.
Thankfully, Nikkor Z lenses tend to excel in this department.
Sharpness
There’s certainly something to be said for a super crisp and detailed portrait that makes the subject appear almost larger than life.
Clearly then, center sharpness will be of importance to most portrait photographers.
However, unless you’re in the somewhat unusual habit of placing your subjects right at the edge of the frame, corner sharpness is much less critical in portrait photography than with other genres such as landscapes, interiors, or product photography.
In any case, it’s important not to go overboard about the minutiae of lens optics and other technical details.
In all likelihood these will be noticed only by the photographer who took the shot, and certain pixel-peepers of a borderline neurotic disposition. To be clear, an overly-soft lens should be avoided. But in an area of photography that is primarily about creating an expressive image that captures the sitter’s personality, a lens that picks up every pore and skin blemish in astonishing detail should probably not be too high on anybody’s list of priorities. Indeed, it can even be a distraction.
Look at it this way; nobody has ever won (or indeed lost) a portrait photography award due to the optics of their lens. An otherwise great portrait that is somewhat less than perfect optically is still a great portrait.
Meanwhile a boring or badly realized portrait that is absolutely pin sharp is still a bad portrait.
Great if you can combine both fantastic content and exemplary optics, but if the absolute top-of-the-range lens is out of your budget, don’t for a minute think that this will stop you from producing stunning portrait photos.
In short, avoid any lens that performs exceptionally badly on this front (though realistically there are very few modern lenses that do), but don’t assume that a sharper photo is necessarily a better photo.
Rather, a sharper photo is just a sharper photo; one which may be either good or bad, independently of its sharpness.
Focal Length
While it’s certainly true that a portrait could be taken on any focal length of lens you want, there’s good reason why wide-angle lenses are generally not recommended for the task.
With its exaggerated perspective, you might think that the portrait you just shot on a 20mm lens looks cool; but as nobody wants to see themself with a gigantic nose, bulging eyes, or a disproportionately large forehead, your subject is unlikely to agree with you.
In contrast, a longer focal length lens will have the effect of flattening perspective, resulting in a more flattering likeness of your subject.
For environmental portraits – i.e. portraits that show the subject in the context of their surroundings – a 50mm lens will usually be just wide enough.
Although you may be able to get away with going as wide as 35mm, just as long as you don’t stand too close to the subject (the Pinocchio effect again).
However, aside from the fact that you’d still not be photographing the sitter in the most flattering manner, it will also be quite difficult to get much separation between subject and background at either of these focal lengths.
So unless you especially want to show the background in some detail, a longer lens will likely provide better results.
Often you’ll see a particular lens referred to as being “a portrait lens.” Although the term is a little vague (as we said, in practice you could shoot a portrait with any lens), a lens will usually be referred to in this way if it fulfills three essential criteria. Of these, fast maximum aperture and bokeh we’ve already looked at above, meanwhile the third criterion is typically that the lens in question has a focal length of between 80 and 105mm. The reason for this is that lenses within this range will:
● Provide sufficient magnification to fill the frame with only the sitter’s head and shoulders.
● Throw the background out of focus at most apertures, creating good separation.
● Produce a pleasing perspective that is flattering for the subject.
However, while most – if not all – portrait photographers will likely want to own a lens within this focal range, it’s worth keeping in mind that they are not appropriate for every conceivable portrait photography scenario.
For example, if all portraits were shot purely as head-and-shoulder studies, portraiture would be a particularly formulaic and uninteresting genre of photography.
Meanwhile, if it’s important to you that the viewer understands something of the location – when shooting someone in their workplace, for example – then a lens that reduces everything in the background to an unrecognizable blur would not be an appropriate tool for that particular job.
What’s more, if we specifically look at headshot portraits, then a slightly longer focal length of say 110 to 180mm could also be a good option.
This will permit even greater separation of the subject from the background, making the image about the person’s face and nothing else. Just bear in mind that the longer the focal length, the further away you’ll need to stand in order to get the subject’s entire head in the frame, and therefore the more difficult it will be to establish any kind of rapport with them.
Primes vs Zooms
It’s always been the rule that prime lenses tend to be sharper than zooms.
While that still holds true today, it’s worth keeping in mind that most modern lenses – of any kind – perform extremely well optically.
True, if a prime and zoom from the same manufacturer are considered side-by-side, there may well be some difference in sharpness; with the prime almost certainly being the sharper of the two. But as mentioned above, sharpness isn’t the be-all and end-all of portrait photography.
In any case, all other things being equal, the differences between a prime and a zoom are unlikely to be so great as to cause any major problems in practice.
You should by all means keep sharpness in mind when choosing a lens. But if you really would find a zoom more convenient than a prime (and assuming that the zoom performs at least reasonably well in this department), don’t get overly hung-up on optics. In a way, a lens should be evaluated on its merits independently of other products.
So when considering purchasing a specific lens, ask yourself whether the lens in question delivers images of a quality that would satisfy you. If the answer is yes, then don’t worry about how much sharper other options may (or may not) be in comparison.
Putting aside the issue of lens sharpness though, what will likely be an issue for those weighing up the merits of primes vs zooms is the ratio between maximum aperture and retail price.
And regardless of whether we’re talking about primes or zooms, faster lenses invariably cost more than slow ones. At the same time though, primes tend to be faster than zooms by default. You can certainly purchase fairly fast zooms, but they will almost always cost more than a comparable prime lens with the same maximum aperture. And when it comes to really wide apertures, such as f/2 and beyond, you’ll struggle to find many zoom lenses that offer such specs.
To summarize, then, if you’ve got plenty of money to spend, and don’t need anything faster than, say, f/2.8, there are certainly some very good zooms available for the Nikon Z series of cameras. On a more restricted budget?
Or require even greater speed? A prime will be the way to go.
Final Thoughts
Choosing between the various Nikon Z lenses that are appropriate for portrait photography is simultaneously both easy and difficult.
Easy in the sense that the Z-mount line-up is still rather limited, so there simply aren’t that many lenses to choose from when compared with the vast range available for the brand’s DSRLs. But hard in that all of the Z-mount lenses that Nikon has released to date are fantastic photographic tools that are likely to satisfy even the most technically demanding of portrait photographers.
In short, you can’t really go wrong with any of them, which can make it tricky to narrow your selection down.
In practice, choosing the right Z-mount lens for portraiture simply means understanding your own needs as a photographer and selecting the lens which most closely meets your requirements.
Which Z-mount lens(es) would you choose for shooting portraits, and why?
I’d love to hear your arguments both for and against the different Nikkor S models in the comments section below.
