I hadn't joined in the PUG discussion because until tonight I hadn't had a chance to look at it. Now that I have looked at it a couple of things struck me as interesting.
Most of the pictures use prime lenses, primarily in the 50-85mm focal length range. They are almost all framed very tight. Most of them use large apertures for shallow depth of field. All of this, is, of course very "traditional" portraiture technique. Even my own entry basically conforms to these criteria. The reason I find this interesting is that as a photojournalist I am used to "environmental portraiture". On the job I view 28mm effective focal length as my "portrait" lens, with 85ish lenses used for more typical portrait framing and working distances when photographing, for example, a parent and child engaged in some activity. The only shot I remember from the PUG (I might have missed a few...) that was shot "close and wide" in the journalistic style was shot with an optio. People seem to favor sharpness even in their portraits, as opposed to the "moodiness" of blur, diffusion, grain, etc. I also notice that lots of PDML folks seem to have *istDs now. DJE
