...and that's the trouble. I'm not sure if I'm lacking much, since I have the 85mm distance covered with my 2.8 lenses. I did just acquire a 50mm 1.8d. My thought is can I pass up buying the 85 for the current price or not? If I decide I don't need it, I'm thinking I could sell it a year or so later for at least the price I paid for it, since used versions were going for $450ish prior to the Nikon lens sale event.
I think you might be missing a key portraiture point Joe. Your DX lenses have a relatively slow maximum aperture which translates to w
ide depth of field. Unfortunately that is a real drawback of DX in my opinion. Ideally portraiture should have a depth of field just deep enough to keep the subject(s) in sharp focus and throw the background
out of focus. The 85mm f/1.8
would give you that at f/2.8. I cannot tell you how many portraits I have seen ruined, in my opinion at least, by
professional photographers no less, who used too small an aperture so that the background is sharp all the way to the horizon. That is an amateurish mistake. When I say shallow depth of field, this is what I am talking about. I shot this with a D700 and 180mm f/2.8 ED AIS lens @ f/4. I had to use a 4x ND filter to allow me to do it, even at 100 ISO, but the shot would not have been nearly as pleasing to the eye had the horizon been sharp.
The image below is an even better example. I will sometimes go as long as a 300mm f/2.8 ED-IF AIS Nikkor for portaiture. Using an f/4 aperture, the depth of field is only a couple of feet deep, but look how well it separates the model from the background without losing a sense of place? The long focal length also compresses perspective, which I find pleasing. In most cases with portaiture,
less is more when it comes to depth of field.
