As I know I’m going to be shooting with medium format for my current project I thought it might be wise to look into the advised lenses to use in medium format portrait photography.
Now because medium format is a larger frame than your 35mm camera you need to allow for this with the lens. For example:
If a 50mm focal length lens is projecting the scene onto an area 24mm high × 36mm wide (the size of a full-frame 35mm exposure), a certain amount of the scene will be recorded. If a 50mm focal length lens is projecting the same scene onto an area 56mm high × 56mm wide (the size of a 6×6 or 2¼” square frame), obviously a much larger amount of the scene will be recorded (more than three and a half times as much). So, while a 50mm lens on a 35mm camera produces what we might call a “standard” field of view, a 50mm lens on a 6×6 camera produces a wide-angle field of view.
A portrait lens usually is 100 mm to 150 mm for a 35mm camera or standard DSLR and gives a sharp, clear image of your subject while capturing a soft out-of-focus backgrounds. For medium format this translates into the 75-80mm lens.
Here are a few examples of images shot using 80mm lenses on medium format 120 film cameras:
Glogson, Portrait (2012 Poland).
Kay Yang, Juri #2. Portrait (2012 Vancouver)
Anna Kharina, Hitler/Chaplin?, 2009 (Flickr)
Trying to be a photographer... 