Canon New FD 135mm f/2.8

Canon sold a mountain of these, and almost nobody bought them to brag. The New FD 135mm f/2.8 was the second lens an A-1 or AE-1 Program owner picked up after the 50mm, the sensible short tele in a catalog where the f/2 versions got the bragging rights. New FD meant Canon had cleaned up the older breech-lock mount in 1979, ditching the rotating locking ring for a bayonet you twisted by the barrel itself. The 135mm f/2.8 was the workhorse of that line. It was never the exotic one, and that is exactly why it is worth your attention now.

What you get is a lens that is sharp earlier than its reputation suggests. Wide open at f/2.8 the center is already crisp, and by f/4 to f/5.6 it bites across most of the frame. Contrast runs a touch lower than a modern multicoated tele, which on slide film reads as gentle and on black and white reads as easy to print. The out-of-focus rendering is smooth and a little neutral, not the swirly character glass people chase, but clean backgrounds that fall away without nervous edges. Eight aperture blades keep stopped-down highlights close to round, so it skips the polygonal specular shapes that date older five- and six-blade teles.

Most people put it to work on faces and candid distance shooting, the jobs 135mm has always done well. A head-and-shoulders frame from across a room, a subject on stage, a kid down the sideline. The compression at this focal length flatters faces, and f/2.8 is fast enough to lift a subject off a busy background without the bulk or price of the f/2. It is a plain short tele used the plain way, and there is nothing wrong with that.

The honest weakness is flare. Early New FD coatings hold up against the sun better than the chrome-nose lenses that came before, but shoot into a bright window or a backlit rim and you can pull veiling haze and the occasional ghost. The built-in hood helps, but it is shallow, so in strong backlight you may still want to shade the front element with your hand. Field curvature is mild and rarely shows on real subjects. The flare is the part that will actually cost you a frame if you ignore it.

Today this is one of the great value buys in the FD world. It trades cheap because Canon orphaned the FD mount in 1987 when EOS arrived, so none of this glass adapts to autofocus Canon bodies without a corrective element. On mirrorless, with a plain FD adapter, it becomes a sharp manual portrait tele for far less than the Nikkor or Takumar equivalents people cross-shop. The 52mm filter thread is shared across most of Canon's FD primes, so one set of ND or polarizers covers the whole kit. When you meter wide open at f/2.8 in dim light, set Zone Light Meter to the working aperture so the reading matches what the film actually sees, not the marked maximum.