Canon New FD 85mm f/1.2L

Shoot a backlit portrait wide open and the highlights bloom into a soft halo around your subject before the lens settles down by f/2. That glow is the signature of the New FD 85mm f/1.2L, the residual spherical aberration that no f/1.2 design fully tames at full aperture. Stop down one click and it tightens; stop down to f/2.8 and the thing is genuinely sharp across the frame. But almost nobody buys an f/1.2 lens to shoot it at f/2.8.

The L designation marks a ground aspherical element, which Canon could produce only after developing laser-measured, machine-controlled polishing to roughly 0.1-micron precision. The point was volume, not artisanship: the aspheric let them rein in spherical aberration and coma and hold the center at f/1.2 when most fast 85s of the era smeared into mush. The rendering at maximum aperture is low in contrast with a dreamy, slightly veiled quality, then contrast climbs steeply as you close down. Bokeh is round and generally smooth, though the ground aspherical can leave faint onion-ring texture inside bright specular discs, the usual tell of an early aspheric. Focus falls off gently from the plane into the background, and skin tones come back warm. This is a portrait lens first and a low-light lens second.

It belongs to the New FD system, Canon's last manual-focus mount before the EOS break of 1987, which means it is an orphan now. No autofocus body ever took it natively. Wedding and editorial shooters who want this exact look adapt it to mirrorless, where focus peaking finally makes f/1.2 manual focus tolerable. On film bodies like the F-1 or the A-1 you are nailing focus by eye at a depth of field measured in millimeters, and a careless shot lands the eyelashes sharp with the iris already soft.

The honest weakness is weight and focus accuracy working against each other. This is a dense lump of glass, about 680g on the New FD version, noticeably front-heavy on a small body, and the focus throw is long. Wide open at portrait distance you have very little room for error. Some copies show mild longitudinal CA as green and magenta edges on specular highlights at f/1.2, though this lens is better controlled in that respect than many fast 85s of its period.

People still cross-shop it against the Nikon 85mm f/1.4 AI-S and the later EOS 85mm f/1.2L, and the FD version usually wins on character and loses on convenience. Prices have climbed because the aspherical L glass is uncommon and the wide-open look it produces, that low-contrast bloom with warm skin, does not come back easily in post. If you want a clinical, evenly corrected 85, this is not it. People keep buying it for the way it draws a face at f/1.2, which is a specific 1980s quality and one of the nicer ones.

One metering note. At f/1.2 in a dim room you are working at the edge of your meter's low-light range, so meter for the shadow you actually care about and let the highlights bloom. In Zone Light Meter, place that shadow on Zone III or IV and read off the aperture you are actually shooting; the wide-open exposure is what defines this lens, so trust the placement rather than averaging the scene. The 72mm front thread takes standard filters if you want an ND to hold f/1.2 in daylight.