Canon FD 50mm f/1.2L

Canon built this lens to win a fight it kept losing at full aperture. Through the 1970s the FD system leaned on the 55mm f/1.2 and its rare aspherical sibling, then the plain 50mm f/1.2, all of them decent and all of them soft and hazy wide open the way nearly every f/1.2 of the era was. The L that arrived in October 1980 changed the terms. It uses a single ground aspherical element to tame the spherical aberration that smears a fast normal at maximum aperture, paired with Canon's floating focusing system to hold resolution from half a meter out to infinity. The point was a normal lens you could actually shoot at f/1.2 and trust, not just open up for the line on the barrel.

It mostly delivers. Wide open you get a faint glow around specular highlights over a center that is already sharp, with a rendering people call three-dimensional because the in-focus plane lifts out of a very soft surround. Stop to f/2 and the glow is gone. By f/2.8 to f/4 it is genuinely crisp across most of the frame. The bokeh is the draw: smooth, a little nervous at the edges, with out-of-focus points that stay round near center thanks to the eight-blade diaphragm. Color runs warm and contrast is moderate, classic Canon FD character. Flare is the obvious soft spot. Point it at a bright source without the hood and veiling haze washes into the shadows. The 52mm thread takes a standard hood and any ND or polarizer you already own, and the front element does not rotate, which matters if you run a grad.

There was only one version, the New FD 50mm f/1.2 L, made from 1980 until 1987 in the bayonet mount and nothing else. The hand-polished, breech-lock aspherical normal people sometimes confuse it with was the earlier 55mm f/1.2 AL from 1971, a different lens entirely. The 50L focuses down to half a meter and that is as close as it goes.

Who buys it now: portrait and available-light shooters who adapt FD glass to mirrorless bodies, plus the dwindling crowd still running an A-1 or F-1 on film. It gets cross-shopped against the cheaper non-aspherical FD 55mm f/1.2 SSC and against Nikon's Noct, and it usually wins on price-to-character against the Nikkor while costing more than the plain Canons. Beyond flare, some shooters note residual field curvature wide open, the corners pulling their focus plane slightly forward, though the floating design is built to flatten the field and others rate its across-frame evenness as a strength. For people, where the corners are background anyway, the question rarely comes up.

One metering habit pays off here. The reason you bought an f/1.2 is the last hour of daylight and the inside of a bar, and that is exactly where TTL meters in old FD bodies get fooled by a bright window or a candle in frame. Meter the light wide open on Zone Light Meter, place your subject's skin on Zone VI, and let the lens give you the speed. At f/1.2 you are buying about a stop and a half over an f/2 normal, often the difference between a handheld frame and a tripod you did not bring.