Canon New FD 50mm f/1.2L

It is one in the morning, the neon outside a Tokyo izakaya is doing the work the streetlights won't, and somebody is shooting it wide open on a Canon F-1. The New FD 50mm f/1.2L is the lens for exactly that. f/1.2 means you are gathering light a regular fifty cannot touch, and the L badge meant exotic glass: here a single ground aspherical element plus a floating-element group to hold the correction across the focus range. This is the New FD generation, the all-black breech-bayonet design with the chrome release button, the last manual-focus mount Canon made before EF.

Wide open it is not clinical, and that is the point. There is a glow on specular highlights, a slight veiling softness that flatters skin and renders out-of-focus point lights as big soft discs. Subjects separate hard from the background and the transition out of focus comes on fast. Stop down to f/2.8 and the softness snaps shut. By f/4 it is genuinely sharp across the frame, contrast comes up, and the aspherical correction means it never goes mushy in the corners the way a lot of fast normals do. The bokeh stays round because the blades are well rounded, and it does not get nervous or onion-ringy the way some later aspherics can.

The aspherical was put there to tame flare, and it largely works: point this thing near a direct source at f/1.2 and you can still catch the occasional ghost, but for an f/1.2 of the era it holds up well and backlighting is tolerable. The honest wide-open compromise is the other way, the veiling softness and lower contrast you trade for the speed. The bigger catch is weight and price. The 50/1.2L commands a premium over the plain New FD 50/1.2, which is itself an excellent lens, and a lot of shooters decide the aspherical work is not worth the difference for stopped-down shooting.

Who buys it now: FD-system holdouts and adapter people who want the rendering, not just the speed. It introduced in late 1980 and was gone by the late eighties, around the time the EF mount took over the lineup. It gets cross-shopped against the Nikkor 50/1.2 Ai-S and, on the EF side, against the even faster EF 50/1.0L USM that came in 1989 and the EF 50/1.2L USM that replaced it in 2006. The verdict usually lands on character. The FD version has a warmth and a wide-open softness the modern EF corrects away. Available-light portraits, street at night, anything where you want the subject to bloom out of the dark.

One metering note. At f/1.2 in a dark bar your reading lives or dies on the shadows, so meter for the part of the frame you actually need to hold, set your Zone Light Meter placement there, and let the highlights do what they want. That is the whole low-light game with a lens this fast.

The 52mm filter thread is shared across most of the New FD line, so a single ND or a warming filter moves between this and your other FD glass without a stack of step rings. Small thing, but it matters when you are working fast.