A fellow photographer recently had asked me what’s the best lens for fashion photography. As you can imagine there is no one sentence answer for this question as fashion, like everyone else, depends on the photographer’s preference, but I do believe there are some rules that can and should be applied.
One of the primary guidelines when shooting commercial fashion is to stick with a long lens due to getting a desired lens perspective. I was therefore surprised to hear that my friend was being told otherwise by other photographers, and that one photographer even advised her to get the 24-70 mm lens for fashion photography. My answer was “that’s a great lens for weddings but not for fashion”.
My general understanding of fashion photography is that the models should look as tall as possible; therefore, shooting wide is the last thing you’d wanna do as that would make the models look shorter and stockier. Even an 85 mm, which is considered by many portrait photographers to be the shortest acceptable focal length, is not quite long enough for fashion in my opinion (works pretty well for beauty though). I speak from my own experience after seeing the difference between using an 85 and a 135.
I’m not sure if this next point is true, but I’ve been told that photographers who shoot for fashion magazines such as vogue commonly use focal lengths as high as the 200 mm range. But before you go thinking “the longer the focal length the better”, shooting too long, (beyond 200) image compression will start biting you in the butt, resulting in a dimensionally flat image.
All that being said, there is no “best” lens for fashion photography, simply because there are other factors to consider aside from lens perspective alone. As good as shooting at 200 mm is, unless you’ve the luxury of a costly full-frame sensor and space is never an issue (yea right), it’s not exactly convenient to use. Alternatively the 70-200 mm is a very good lens as you have the convenience of zooming plus being able to go up to 200, the problem of course is that it’s costly (the 2.8 version anyway) and weighs you down after a while. I myself prefer to stick with primes and I personally favor the Canon 100 and 135 mm for my full-frame body.
Of course there are some situations in which shooting long is virtually impossible, such as when you’re trying to shoot from a top-down perspective or when you’re working in tight corners.
If anyone feels otherwise feel free to leave a comment as I’m interested in hearing differing opinions.
