3 Rent/Buy Options for Gear, which one is best?

[mari74]

I'm a newbie to photography and to the forum. My question is this: When doing a shoot for money, and in general, is it better to:

A) Rent the body (such as borrowlenses.com), buy the best lens you can afford.
B) Buy the body, rent the best lens you can afford.
C) Buy peripherals and rent the camera system.
D) Rent Everything: Body, Lens, Peripherals.

If I rent for important shoots, it would be 5D MarkII.

For everyday, I'm considering purchasing the Canon EOS Rebel 2ti and a catchall lens. Thoughts, opinions on the 2ti body? Catchall lens recommendation? I found some good deals on B&H for body + 18-135mm (Canon EOS Rebel T2i Digital SLR Camera w/ EF-S 4462B005 B&H). My focus is portraiture. I'd love to own a prime lens for portraiture but that is down the line.

[Sponsors]

PhotoForum.com is a leading Photography Forum, Registered users do not see these ads. Register, it's free!

[TCampbell]

A 5D II body is just enough different than a T2i body to seem a bit awkward if you're "renting" it. I like the 5D controls better, but it would be easier to transition from one body to another if you had something more along the lines of a 60D or 7D (because the controls are laid out similarly.)

Are you expecting to do a paid gig so rarely that owning a body wouldn't be worthwhile?

I can definitely see the value in renting special purpose lenses.

But whenever you rent, make sure you start the rental far enough in advance that you have a chance to get the feel of the gear and lenses (and of course, if there's a problem you'd still have time to get a defective rental product swapped out before the paid gig starts.)

I had a T1i. I currently shoot with a 5D II.

[mari74]

Thanks Tim. I appreciate the help. 60d is within my budget. Can you recommend an everyday lens that is also good for portraiture?

[councilman doug]

A 50mm is pretty much good for everything

[TCampbell]

For "most" (but not all) portraits, you want a lens that creates a fairly flat non-distorted image (which means that wide angles are usually not desirable). On a full-frame camera, portrait lenses are usually 80-85mm and up. On an APS-C camera (like the 60D) it's usually a 50mm and up.

The problem with the "and up" part, is that the higher the focal ratio, the farther back you need to stand to get the same framing. You could use a 100mm lens... you'd just have to walk back twice as far as compared to a 50mm to get equivalent framing on the shot. Indoors, there's often a limit as to how far back you CAN walk without having to use a sledge hammer to take out a wall. So indoor portraiture for a 60D is usually going to favor a 50mm lens.

For outdoor portraits, some photographers really will use a longer lens (I've seen people use the 70-200mm f/2.8) because long low-focal ratio lenses create "compression" which helps with subject isolation... the ability to create a tack-sharp subject and yet still have a beautifully blurred background.

There are photographers who will use a wide-angle lens for "environmental portraiture" -- where you're not necessarily trying to isolate the subject from their environment and the surroundings are intended to be part of the shot. But you could do this outdoors with a 50mm as well... you'd just have to step back farther when shooting and use a higher focal ratio to decrease the bokeh.

There are a number of 50mm lenses from which to choose. The EF 50mm f/1.8mm (aka "nifty fifty") is a very inexpensive lens with great optical quality. The cost is kept down by giving it a cheap plastic body (and although it's obviously "cheap" I've never actually heard of anyone breaking one - so apparently it's just strong enough) and it's auto-focus motor is slow (and a bit noisy). If budget is an issue, it's probably THE ideal lens. But it's not the best (if it were, Canon wouldn't make two others).

The 50mm f/1.4 has better lens body quality and the slow AF motor is replaced by the USM (ultrasonic motor) which is fairly fast and extremely quiet. But the biggest difference in the photos is that it uses an 8 blade aperture (vs. the 5 blade aperture on the f/1.8) and this improves the quality of the background blur. The f/1.8 lens produces a kind of "nervous jittery" bokeh. The f/1.4 produce a bokeh with a smoother quality to it.

There's the 50mm f/1.2L which is, an "L" series lens (Canon's top-end lenses). It improves on the bokeh even more than the f/1.4 and can create a paper-thin depth-of-field (want a portrait where ONLY the eyes are sharp and everything else rapidly goes soft?) While it does improve the bokeh, it does NOT necessarily beat the f/1.4 in other areas of "sharpness" (contrast, resolution/acuity, the ability to control CA, etc.) It has a $1600 price tag. Oh... it is weather sealed.

If your budget allows, go for the 50mm f/1.4 (list price is $400 - street price is probably slightly less) -- otherwise the 50mm f/1.8 will cost about $125.

Apart from lenses... check out lighting. Lighting can do more for your portraiture in terms of impact per dollar spent than just about any lens. For studio shots you want to be able to create shadows with soft transitions and to do that you need lights that are located off camera and you want to diffuse the light (make it appear to originate from a wide-source rather than from a pin-point source.) Shooting a light through an photographic "shoot through" umbrella is cheap (the umbrella usually costs $10-15).

For outdoor portraits you want to be able to control the harshness of the Sun. It's not so much that the Sun is bright... because you can cut the exposure to fix that. The problem is the DIFFERENCE between the sunlit parts of a subject and the shadows is usually quite extreme. In outdoor photography you just want to weaken the difference between highlight and shadow and you do that with "fill flash". This creates gentle shadows that still reveal detail rather than harsh extreme shadows that leave the detail lost in blackness.