Is the canon EF-S 17-85mm good for portraits

I am referring to the amount of light it needs. It's useless even outside on a cloudy weather if you want to capture action. Indoors it is useless without a flash, even with IS if you want to shot humans. Hell it needs 8 times to amount of light an f/2 would and 16 times more light then a 1.4, not to mention the sweet shallow DoF.

Oh sweet jebus...

You don't need a fast lens to study portraiture. Any fool can take a fast lens and shoot it wide open. Whooo-peee! Now if we're lucky, one eye will be in focus.

Portraiture is about light and how it changes the subject. You can shoot wonderful portraits at f/8

It's called slow - not blind. Slow lens.

For me a slow lens would be f/2.8-4. At f/5.6 i consider it blind.

Is having just one eye in focus bad? Show me some of your portraits please so i can understand. i am a portrait noob.

https://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthre​ad.php?t=149144

http://www.photo.net/p​hotos/Dragos Jianu

Who said it's bad?

What do you want to understand exactly?

It sounds to me as though you are either stuck on the idea of using very high shutter speeds all the time or the idea of having a very short depth of field for all your work. Either of these ideas, if they are how you feel, would have the effect of limiting your photographic skills. You need to be able to use a camera over its total range from time to time to produce different kinds of work.

I shoot a lot of my work at apertures of f/5.6 to f/16. Sometimes I will open my lenses up to max aperture, but not very often. The specific reasons for doing so would be either trying to minimize the depth of field for a particular shot or possibly to obtain a faster shutter speed in a very low light situation.

I would not want, in general, to have depth of field so short in a portrait shot that only one eye is sharply in focus. I doubt that most portrait clients would like that either. Blurring the background is one thing, but keeping your primary subject suitably sharp is also usually quite important.