Shooting portraits with a 12,000-euro 400mm f/2.8 lens

Wednesday 4 March 2020, 20:02 by Michelle Peeters | 5,684 views | 0 comments

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to take portraits with a high-end telephoto lens? Daniel and Rachel from Mango Street decided to rent the 12,000-euro Canon EF 400mm f/2.8L IS III USM IS lens and take it on a photo shoot in their distinctive urban portrait style.

There are two major challenges when using a sports / wildlife lens like this for portrait work: weight and distance. The lens weighs 2.8 kilos, so a monopod mounted on the lens's tripod collar is a must, and carrying it to different locations is a real chore.

And when you are as far away as you need to be to take some full-body shots, you have to use walkie-talkies or shout your instructions.

What do you get in return? Firstly, a hugely compressed background because of the field of view, and secondly the ability to completely blur the background, even at f/2.8.

As Rachel points out in the video: even with your subject a full 20 metres away, your depth of field is still only 0.42 metres at a wide-open aperture.

This is not the first or most extreme experiment of this kind to have taken place. A few months ago, Manny Ortiz teamed up with Irene Rudnyk and Gerald Undone to try to take portraits at 900mm using a 600mm lens and a crop-sensor camera.

But although that idea was completely ridiculous (an exercise in wouldn't this be fun to try?) using a 400mm f/2.8 lens for portraits is actually quite doable if you are looking for some unique portraits and are ready to deal with the downsides as well.

Watch the full video above to see Mango Street struggle with this colossal lens, and check out some of the photos they managed to take.

Via: PetaPixel

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