Two lenses every photographer should have in their arsenal are the 35mm f1.4 and the 85mm f1.2. Now you may have notice that my lenses have the infamous red rings around them and that’s because they are Canon EF lenses. While I have them in the Canon variant, they are available in from almost all the other camera manufacturer like Sony, Nikon, Fuji, and even some third party lens makers like Sigma and Tamron. One thing to keep in mind, the Canon 85mm f1.2 in both Ef and RF mount versions is the only one with auto focus and the only other 85mm with an aperture of f1.2 is the Samyang 85mm f1.2 and guess what, its manual focus.

Samyang 85mm f1.2

With that said, these focal lengths can be found in zoom lenses ranging from 24-70mm f2.8 and 70-200mm f2.8 however, you will lose the potential background separation and light gathering of smaller apertures like f1.2 and f1.4. Overall these lenses a blast to shoot with, I definitely recommend anyone serious about portrait photography to invest in them. The video below goes into a few other details and examples of the results you can achieve with these lenses.