Canon FD 28mm f/2.8

Walk a flea market in any city that still has one and you will find this lens in a bin of FD glass, usually for the price of two coffees. It was one of Canon's best-selling FD lenses, the standard second buy after the kit 50mm. Someone walks out with an AE-1 or an A-1, the nifty fifty comes in the box, and the salesman talks them into the 28mm f/2.8 on the way to the register. So they turn up everywhere on the used market. That ubiquity is the whole story. This was the affordable wide angle for a generation of people learning to see in 35mm.

Optically it is a retrofocus design, which any SLR wide has to be to clear the swinging mirror. Stopped down to f/8 it is genuinely sharp across the frame, the kind of even performance that makes it a quiet landscape and travel lens. Wide open at f/2.8 the corners go soft and contrast drops a little, and there is some barrel distortion you will notice on architecture. None of that mattered to the people who bought it, and honestly it does not matter much now. Color rendering is neutral and slightly cool, typical Canon FD, and it takes scanning and printing without a fight.

The honest weakness is flare. Point it near the sun, especially the early single-coated S.C. breech-lock version from 1975, and you get veiling haze and the odd colored blob. Canon's coatings improved across the run, and the later black New FD from 1979 on resists it somewhat better, though every version of this lens can ghost badly pointed straight into light. The New FD is not a different mount, by the way. It keeps the breech-lock principle and just adds a one-twist button so you stop fiddling with the rotating ring. If you are shooting into sun, hood it without thinking about it.

Who uses it: street and documentary shooters who want 28mm because it pushes you in close without the stretched edges a 24mm gives you. It is a working focal length, the one you stop noticing once it becomes a habit. At f/2.8 it is fast enough for indoors and overcast streets but it is not a low-light specialist. For available-dark work people reach for the f/2 version of this lens or a faster fifty. The cross-shop today is the Nikkor 28mm f/2.8 AI-S, which is sharper wide open and costs more, and the various screw-mount wides if you are on a Pentax body. People still buy the Canon because it is cheap, small, and stays out of your way at the price.

One metering note. The 52mm thread is a common FD size, so filters are cheap and easy to find, and an orange or red filter, a polarizer, or an ND can live on this lens permanently. (The earliest breech-lock copies took 55mm, so check before you buy a stack of rings.) When you screw a filter on, dial that factor into Zone Light Meter so your reading already accounts for the light the glass is eating. A red filter on black-and-white is roughly three stops, and the app folds that straight into the metered exposure instead of leaving you to do the math in your head on a windy street corner.