As for portraits, I love how our English/American cultural biases dictate subject distance. We tend to be comfortable holding conversations at about a five-foot distance. So we like portraits to show faces from about that distance. Then we try to impose that upon people who come from cultures where the norm is to get right up close. For them 2-3 feet is comfortable.
We reason our discomfort away with silly statements about perspective. But that is really displacement on our part. As an example we are usually quite comfortable with portraits from about 3 feet, if we know that person intimately. Humans are such strange animals.
An aside about cropping wide angles v. short tels: Distance, and aperture being the same, the only difference in the photos will be grain magification. Note I said aperture, not f-stop. That experiment will I show something about DOF that I have tried to explain here before.
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Rob Studdert wrote:
On 7 Aug 2004 at 0:42, Fred wrote:
The 135 is really only excellent as a portrait lens for tight head shots
...or, if you like to sometimes stand back a little farther from the subject.
I must be really strange, I've managed to pull off all types of shots with my 125/135mm lenses, portraiture included.
-- graywolf http://graywolfphoto.com/graywolf.html
