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Feedback: EF 85 mm f/1.8 USM sharpness for handheld shots

Started Jun 20, 2015 | Questions thread
Alastair Norcross
Alastair Norcross Veteran Member • Posts: 9,874
Re: Feedback: EF 85 mm f/1.8 USM sharpness for handheld shots

I have had the 85 F1.8 for about nine years, and used it on the 20D, 50D, 7D, and 7DII, all crop cameras. It's a very sharp lens, and great for portraits. I find I need to use at least 1/125 to have a good chance of avoiding camera shake, and preferably 1/200 or faster. Outdoors, that's easy. Indoors, without flash, you might need to crank up the ISO a bit, but the 70D has good low light performance, so that shouldn't be a problem. As someone else said, if you shoot fairly wide open (F1.8-F2.2), you'll have a very narrow depth of field, which is really the point of a lens like this, but it also takes good focusing technique. In particular, try to place the chosen focus point over the closer eye, and don't use focus and recompose, which can shift the plane of focus.

As for the purple fringing, which can be annoying on high contrast edges at wide open apertures, that's fairy easy to correct in a program like Lightroom, if you shoot RAW.

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Alastair
http://anorcross.smugmug.com
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