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Does a 90 mm lens make a great portrait lens? I think it makes an incredible portrait lens. We’re going to look at that new lens from Tamron. It’s a 90mm macro. It’s made both for Nikon and for Sony, F/2.8. But we’re going to do it in the context of an incredible Irving Penn image that I’ve always loved. It’s a shot that he did in the 60s, a woman in a black hat. 
We’ve got Sasha here. She’s dressed up for us. We’re going to look at how we lit this and then we’re going to break down this lens and just see exactly how and why a 90mm macro makes a great portrait lens. So let’s get started and see what we can do.
So why do I think a 90mm is a great portrait lens? There’s several reasons. One, you buy an 85mm, and you buy an 85mm and usually it’s a f/1.4, f/1.8, f/1.2. Those are great lenses. They’re pretty expensive because of how fast the aperture is. But this is an f/2.8. So it’s not as fast but f/2.8 has always given me plenty of fall off in the background. 
It gives me beautiful bokeh in the background. So I love that look. It’s long enough, 90mm, that it just gives me a beautiful look at the face. It doesn’t distort the face. It just gives you that great kind of look at the face where there’s no distortion. 
It looks perfect. It’s rounded, it looks really excellent. So I feel like it gives us a great look at the face just like an 85mm does. But you also have macro capabilities. You can shoot macro. 
This is a 1:1 macro, so you can get in and shoot just really close kinds of macro things. So I can get in tight on her eyes. I can get tight on other kinds of, I’m shooting macro things. So it becomes a lens that really does two different things really well. I think it does portraits extremely well and it does macro work extremely well. So that’s why I’ve always thought if you’re really on a budget and you don’t want an 85mm and a 90mm macro that the 90mm becomes a great portrait option and macro option. And that’s why I think 90mm makes a whole lot of sense.
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Irving Penn was a photographer that I really admired as I started my career. He would often show up in American Photographer which was kind of the place to find out about anything in the photography industry at that time. He did incredible fashion for Vogue. He did great still life. He’s kind of known for a person who started to create more art and not so much just commercial. So it was really a combination of Fine Art and Commercial. 
He really was at the dawn of that era where he used a lot of natural light. But he started to use strobe light. He started to use continuous light. So there started to be options out there. Of course, continuous light, they used all through the 50s, Hurrell and that kind of direct hard light. But this was a time when strobes started to come in and they started to use more strobe light. And so he was one of the people who did that type of work.
So we’re going to look at some things like an early beauty dish. Just a hard reflector beauty dish as we shoot today. It’s a great look. We’ll just see exactly how that look affects the face and how it works for the image. I’ve always thought Irving Penn was an incredible photographer. So if you want to see his work look him up and see some of the images. We’ll show you some of those images now. He really is fabulous.
We’re going to do several different lighting setups. But this is our first one. So it starts with kind of an old-fashioned hard beauty dish. It’s not real big. It’s fairly small. So it gives you a very directional light. But it has a nice kind of metal baffle in the front. So the light is not a direct light on her face. It’s bouncing into that cover over the flash tube. It bounces into the beauty dish and gives us a beautiful light on her face. She’s young, she’s beautiful, she’s got great skin. So this light looks fabulous. Me, old, not so beautiful, not so young. This light would look terrible on. But it’s just, it’s a beautiful, it actually gets rid of most all of any kind of shadows because you get that round kind of look.
It’s right at the camera. So it’s just above the camera. It gives us a butterfly, slight butterfly. I slid in this reflector. This is my homemade reflector and I bounce a little light up into her face.Which just gives her a great illumination from underneath with that hat. We’re looking through the netting which is beautiful. And so now, once we’ve done that, we’ve got all that up front. It’ll make a great, gorgeous black and white on her face. Because we get enough highlight on her skin that it’s going to really read and translate well into black and white.
For the background we have two umbrellas. We got one on the right and left. And that just gives us a beautiful open light on the white seamless back there. We want that nice contrast so it gives us at least a stop over our key light and just gives us a really nice white background. So there’s our first setup, three lights and a reflector.
This is bead foam which is beautiful the way the light bounces off this bead foam. It just gives you a beautiful light on the face. I’ve loved this, I’ve used these since I started my career. It’s just a great look. Check out our short, “Make It or Buy It”. 
So I’ve got two umbrellas, black on the front side and white on the inside. And the reason that is, is because I don’t want the light to pass through. I want to keep it just on the background. And I keep these flat towards the background. 
I don’t want to turn it all, turn them at all, because I don’t want the inside of this to start seeing my model. It’ll start lighting her from behind. So I got to keep these flat to the background. 
And when I go to 1/200th of a second with the Westcott FJ400s it’ll get rid of all the ambient light in the room and give me just a beautiful light from just the background and light on her face. So there’s our first setup. 
I love the light. It looks really pretty. I love the wardrobe. Julene did an excellent job. Sasha did a great job. So we’re going to move on to our next setup here.
This lens is doing an incredible job. It has all the features that we’ve seen on the past Tamron lenses. It comes in about $699. 
It has 67mm filter size in the front so it matches all the other filter sizes on most of the lenses that we’re getting. 
But this is this new generation of lens. It’s got the ability to program great for video because it allows you to the use the new Tamron app, the new 4.0 app, mobile app. 
Which allows you to set focus points to move in and out. With focus points it does a lot of video features. That makes this a great video lens. But it’s been doing great. It’s made both for Nikon Z and for Sony E. So let’s go on to our next setup and see what we got.
So this next image is kind of an ode to Audrey Hepburn. There’s a great shot with her with a hat looking straight into the camera and so we’re setting this up pretty much like that. It gives us an idea how to just get that same kind of light. 
So I’ve got a beauty dish. It’s the 24 inch beauty dish from Westcott. It’s got a baffle. It’s got the metal insert in the back. And I’ve got a baffle on it. So I’ve got an egg crate on it so it really cuts down the area coverage. It’s still a little too hard for my taste. I want to give us some nice soft kind of shadows on her face. 
So we took the translucent out of the Westcott 5-in-1. We put that in between the beauty dish and her face. And when you get away from the beauty dish it softens the light. But we also put a small card in there to cut the light off from her lower part of her underneath her chin. So it darkens, becomes a little darker there. And then just to open up all those shadows we bounced light underneath the fill card underneath her in the front. 
So Westcott 400 on really low power. It’s like on two, the lowest it’ll go. The one up here is on as high as it’ll go so that’s really our main power. What that does in the background is just beautiful because you have a white background and there’s just enough spill back there that it’s not black obviously. It starts to bring it up and it just becomes a really soft light gray. 
It looks really pretty from behind. So that’s how we set it up, just two lights and the white background. That umbrella, if you see in the corner, we used on the last one, is not in use. So just those two lights. 
But we did augment the lights because we’ve got the beauty dish with an egg crate on it, with a shoot through translucent, with a card to be able to just give us a nice little pool of light around her face. To give us that beautiful light. So there’s how we set up our lighting. Let’s take a look at some of the images.
So I’ve been shooting with this in the macro mode on some of these shots. I can get in really tight on her makeup, on her lips. It’s just a lot of fun to shoot with that macro. It’s a 1:1 macro which is really awesome. You can go between a 1:4 to a 1:1. So it gives you great options in the macro range.
So it’s 5 inches. It’s fairly compact. It’s also a lightweight because it’s 22 ounces. So I really think it’s an awesome portrait lens. 
We’ve got an autofocus limiter which is really a great thing because it allows you to change the area of what it’s going to cover. 
So if you’re trying to come way in and way out it becomes very hard for that autofocus to be really fast. So when you can limit the area that it has to travel it doesn’t have to go all the way from infinity to way into macro, you know. It really makes a big difference. So it’s just a great thing when you have a limiter, autofocus limiter on a lens like this. Because you can set it for what you’re doing if you go from 7 meters to infinity. I mean that’s much closer. That makes it a lot easier to keep that focus distance very short and fast. That’s what that’s meant to do.
So this is a really simple lighting setup. It’s a single light. We have a 24 inch beauty dish. It’s got the grid in the front of it and it’s got the insert in it to bounce the light back into the box. And then we just, it’s a light on her. I put this in here to bounce light back up.
But the reality is that there is no light from this that’s touching this at all. So this is really not doing anything for us. We did a few where we turned that light on to bounce some light in just to open up the shadows. 
Those look kind of nice but I think really it looked very stark and very interesting, very startling with just a single light on her face. As I tilt that light up the background becomes brighter. As I tilt that light down the background becomes darker. 
So it’s just a single light lighting her and the background at the same time. It just gives us a variety of different background looks if we want those. You can take a look at a couple of those here or we just we got the one we like. We like that heavy kind of dark shadow silhouette on her face. And see her hands moving and just saw some interesting things there. So there’s how we lit it, single light.
So Sasha’s got the lens hood here. It’s a new design from Tamron. It’s got a little door here which allows you to get into the filters. So if you need a roll a polarizer or you need to work on any of your filters when it’s on, you can just open that little drawer and be able to roll your polarizer or work on any of the filters you might have on your camera. That’s a great option. A nice step forward with their lens hood.
So the lens is a 12 blade design. It’s going to look awesome when you stop down. Kind of that, kind of looking at a pinpoint light. It’s going to give you an interesting star effect.
But I think the most important thing about this lens is it’s really a lens that’s made for video. You have the ability to get into the app and to be able to change the configuration of the lens. You can change the button on the side and be able to change it into whatever function you want it to perform. 
You also have the ability to use the app, the new Tamron 4.0 app that allows you to set focus points. It allows you to pull focus. It turns this into kind of a video, really in the lens video manipulation for focus. Which is really a great step forward. 
And a lot of times you can use that doing different video shots if you have a camera you can’t get to. Or if you’re on a slider to just be able to move that focus point back and forth and be able to control that from the app on your phone. So a lot of options with that app. That makes this lens really a great video lens.
This new series of lenses from Tamron has incredible autofocus. It’s high speed, it’s very precise. It’s going to track with subjects. It’s made to be on that Sony camera and keep up on that Sony which is really, the autofocus features are so important. And Tamron delivers with this lens.
All right, so let’s wrap this up. I love shooting portraits. I love being in the studio and shooting portraits. And I’ve always loved the 90mm. I used the 90mm f/2.8 that Tamron made EF for years. I love to see this lens for Sony because it really fits right into my workflow on how I like to shoot. Love the look.
Love the f/2.8 that gives us great looking bokeh. It just gives us the ability to get great images plus that macro. So you got everything from portraiture to really good macro capabilities with that lens. 
It makes it a super useful lens at a really good price, and sharp! That’s what’s so nice about it. So it gives us that whole package. So thank you very much for being with us today. Let’s look at some more of those images and you keep those cameras rollin’ and keep on clickin’!
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