Beginner Photo Enthusiast's Confusion With Facial/Body Distortion?

Hi, I'm a beginner transitioning from point and click photography, and I'm a bit at a loss here concerning purchasing the best lens for my purposes… Head shot, portrait, fashion, and street style photography.

According to this link, it'll appear that 300-350mm offers the least facial distortion: http://www.stepheneastwood.com/tutorials/lensdistortion/strippage.htm

It says underneath that with the 300mm, you can be as close as 11inches away from the subject, but how come I heard jokes from people that they'll have to stand a football field length away if they're using a 300mm? I also heard that any lens that's not a wide zoom would not produce distortion, but according to this experiment, even 85mm does!

To get as true to life representations, how do I know when to use which lenses and how far to stand away from the subject for my multiple purposes? As you can tell, *honestly* is the biggest thing I'm looking for in my photography. I do not wish for negative or even positive types of distortion.

I'm planning to get a Nikon 5100 and either buying the 28-300mm VR or the 18-200mm VR. How do I choose? I would love to get something like the 1.4/85mm, but even at my not so modest budget, I can't afford that. Hopefully I will be able to get the very narrow vintage shallow depth of field look by blurring the background more in Photoshop… I think?

Can anyone offer help please
-?

Those experiments were carried out on a full frame censor, your 5100 has a 1.5 crop sensor.
I'm not sure what difference that makes to the distortion, but it does mean your image will be 1.5x zoomed in compared to the full frame.
My advice, get a 50mm F1.8. At under £100 you can't go wrong.
They focus in to 42cm and the depth of field (blurry background) is great.

The confusion must be in the link, no portraits are taken at this distance. Photography represents reality, if you're looking for a good portrait lens, get a 50, 80, 135, even a wide angle if you wish. If you want just to copy reality in the most accurate way, I don't know what you need

What it means is that the close focusing distance of the 300mm lens is 11 inches - however, that will probably get one eye in the field of view! If you want to shoot a full body portrait, yes you'd have to stand a considerable distance away.

Those images were taken using a full frame (35mm) camera - if you use a cropped sensor, or medium format (I'm guessing not) then the focal lengths of the lenses will have a different field of view.

I can tell you what lenses I use and I do all the styles of photography that you are wanting to do;
50mm f1.8
85mm f1.8
135mm f2.8
24-70mm f2.8
70-200mm f2.8 - this is the longest I would go.

I have also used a wide angle lens for environmental portraiture - the distortion is less if you are further away from your subject, and it can give some interesting results - do not be afraid to experiment!

Don't forget that shallow depth of field is not just about about aperture - it's also related to focal length of the lens (telephoto lenses will have shallower dof than wide angle) and the camera to subject distance vs subject to background distance - the nearer you are (& the further the b/g is away) the shallower the dof will be. At f5.6 (widest aperture at 200mm the 18-200mm is capable of) you will have fairly shallow dof.

To focus at 11 inches, you need a macro lens. There may be a 300mm macro (haven't seen one yet but I'm not the adventurous). The "football field away" is not a joke. That's reality. All lenses have distortion. Blame Physics on that. The least are normal or standard lenses, the ones that are closest to the angle of view of human eyes.

http://keerok-photography.blogspot.com/2011/05/lenses-so-many-of-them-there-is-no-best.html

http://www.tamron-usa.com/...arison.php