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@blueeyes, here is an example of using cheaper gear for a portrait and it not turning out very well.
Keep in mind, I 100% knew that this would probably be my result beforehand tonight. It’s not “profesional” quality work, and is really just a nice snapshot. I went out into the wilderness, and knew I’d have to wade in my rainboots across an almost-dry river, over mossy stones, and was not going to being my 5D Mark II or my 70-200 f/2.8 lens, because those are VERY expensive and I cannot risk them getting wet or damaged if I were to slip on the rocks. If my Rebel or one of the kit lenses gets damaged, it won’t stop me from doing what I do, and that is why I took them on my hike.
This photo was shot with a T2i, and the 55-250 f/4.0-5.6 telephoto kit lens. It’s a really crummy lens for any portraiture to be honest, but for doing nature shots, it’s not terrible. Especially on a crop body, that focal length is really magnified and I am able to get a shallow depth of field even at f/5.6 and some nice bokeh. But this lens hardly ever takes a sharp photo, especially in low light. Plus, the Rebel can’t perform well over around 400 ISO. After that it gets pretty noisy/grainy. This was shot at 800 ISO.
I did edit it in both Lightroom and Photoshop, where I removed noise, increased the exposure (it was pretty underexposed, my mistake), and adjusted the color temperature and saturation. I made it look as good as I possibly could.
If you view some of my other work on Flickr, you’ll see that some portraits are tack sharp even on the Rebel. It is because I used a high-quality lens.