The Natural Light Portrait Book

Avoid Wide-Angle Lenses for Most Portraits

If your goal is to make people look their very best, I would tell you what I would tell a friend: avoid wide-angle lenses. They generally create distortion and people’s faces usually don’t look very good when they’re distorted. Plus, if any part of your subject gets near the edges of the image, those parts will get elongated (like the subject’s foot above), so you pretty much have to get your subject right in the center of the frame. That’s why I recommend sticking with telephoto or longer zoom lenses (think at least 85mm or longer) for more flattering results. Now, you might have instances where you ...