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My favorite focal length for portraiture is typically 85mm and in a world populated by LED studio lighting a faster lens is appreciated as well. But there is more to shooting portraits than shooting one kind of lens and using one kind of lighting —all the time.

I shot all of the images using a Panasonic Lumix G5 that was been converted for infrared use by LifePixel. Lens was a borrowed Voigtlander Super Wide Heliar 15mm f/4.5 M Mount Aspherical III lens that was attached to the camera with a $24.50 Fotodiox Leica M to Micro Four-thirds adapter.

The Zeiss 50mm f/1.4 Planar T* that’s for Canon EOS DSLRs is designed to be used at medium and longer distances and produces high-performance image captures even when shot wide open that only improves as the lens is stopped down.

The late Richard Avedon once said,“ My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.”

Up until recently, most of the images that I made were captured using mirrorless cameras and sometimes with DSLRs, But if you’ve been reading this blog lately you know that I have a renewed interest in shooting film. That’s why I still own several film cameras*, including a Leica M6 TTL, Hasselblad XPan, Zeiss SW, Minolta Prod20, my new (used) Yashica FX-3 Super 2000 and a medium format, gold-trimmed Seagull TLR that Mary gave me as a birthday gift many years ago.