James,
Canon has a 135mm F2.8 soft focus lens that was made just for portraiture. And in my old corporate portrait studio days, we'd put some diffusion material over the lens -- usually a nylon stocking -- to soften the wrinkles and laugh-lines. So, it's nothing new. If you're shooting babies, you don't have to worry about skin. They have wonderfully soft, smooth skin. But as we get older, the "character" lines appear and there's a bunch of retouching software out there just for the purpose of softening those lines and smoothing out skin blemishes.

When I shoot animals, I'm interested in sharp images. So, I'm almost always shooting at F8.0 in the studio. But for people, I'll dial down the strobes and open up the lens to get a softer image. Here's a portrait from 2007 taken with the 28-135 but shot at F8.0 because there was a difference in the plane of focus between mom and baby. However, I shot this in RAW and applied no sharpening in PP to maintain the softness. That's the other thing I'll do when shooting people. Shoot RAW and no sharpening in post.



I think we all tend to get all wound up in how sharp our lenses are and how many lines they can resolve on an ISO 12233 Chart. And, yes, that's important. But what distinguished the great glass of years ago -- Leica, Contax, Zeiss -- wasn't just resolution. It was the depth of color and the micro-contrast of those lenses. Frankly, it's what separates L-Glass in the Canon line from the rest of the consumer/prosumer lenses. So when I look for a lens, I'm looking for the character of the images that lens can produce. Which is why the 28-135 caught my eye. I was looking over a bunch of files from 2007 through 2010 and the images taken with that particular lens caught my eye. They had a certain depth that stood out from the other images.

The fact that the lens is a bit soft wide open is not a huge problem since I'll be using it primarily in the studio or outside for show candids. In those environments, I can stop it down or control the light to take advantage of that softness. As I said, sharpness is good. But sometimes, softness isn't all that bad .

Jim