Canon FD 135mm f/2

It is two in the morning on a quiet street and the photographer is standing across the road from a lit doorway, FD 135 wide open, hunting a frame that compresses three blocks of neon into one stack of color. That is where this lens earns its keep. At f/2 and 135mm you get a long, narrow slice of sharp focus floating in front of a background that has dissolved into smooth light, and you can shoot it handheld in conditions where a slower tele would leave you stranded.

Canon introduced this lens in 1980 as a New FD optic, and it carries the Super Spectra Coating that keeps contrast holding up against point sources at night. Wide open it is already sharp where it counts, the center crisp enough for an eye or a sign, with the corners trailing a little the way every fast tele does at maximum aperture. Stop to f/2.8 or f/4 and the whole frame tightens and the contrast climbs. The bokeh is the reason people keep it: out-of-focus highlights stay round and quiet near wide open, the roll from sharp to unsharp is gradual rather than abrupt, and faces sit off their backgrounds without that nervous double-line edge you get from over-corrected glass.

This is a heavy piece of glass with a 72mm front, not a pocket tele, and it goes front-heavy on a small body like an AE-1. That weight is the price of cramming f/2 into a 135. Color runs slightly warm and a touch contrasty on slide film. Reds come through clean and the blacks sit deep, and anyone who shot the FD system will recognize the look on the page.

Who reaches for it: portrait shooters who want compression and subject separation without hauling a fast 85, and street and stage photographers working from a polite distance in low light. It has had a second life on mirrorless bodies, where focus peaking finally tames the razor-thin plane that an SLR screen made a gamble. The honest weakness is that plane itself. Hand-focusing f/2 at 135mm gives you depth of field measured in millimeters at close range, and a miss puts the eyelashes sharp while the iris is not. The long focus throw helps you be precise, but it asks for patience.

These trade for noticeably less than the Contax/Zeiss Planar 135mm f/2, which is why budget fast-tele kits keep landing here. The Zeiss has the edge on dead-center resolution wide open, but you pay for it, and most people shooting the Canon stopped worrying about line pairs years ago. One practical note: at f/2 in a dark venue you are metering wide open with almost no margin, so when you stop down to shoot, set your real working aperture in Zone Light Meter and let it hold the reading off the subject rather than trusting an averaged frame. Exact exposure matters as much as exact focus on this one.