Canon FD 85mm f/1.2L

Wide open at f/1.2 this lens does not snap to clinical sharpness. It glows. There is a faint veil over the highlights, spherical aberration that Canon never fully tamed even with the ground aspherical element up front, and that softness is exactly why portrait shooters chased it through the FD era and well into the mirrorless-adapter years. Skin loses its pores. Catchlights bloom a little. Stop down to f/2 and the veil burns off; by f/4 the center and mid-frame are genuinely sharp, though the extreme corners on a fast tele like this keep tightening up past f/5.6 and never quite become the point. Nobody buys an 85 f/1.2 to shoot it at f/4 anyway.

A word on the badge, because it gets muddled. The "L" is Canon's mark for its premium line, and it only appears on the New FD version from 1980 onward. The 1976 original was branded S.S.C. Aspherical, not L. What both share is the headline feature: a precision-ground aspherical element, ground rather than molded, which was expensive enough that Canon priced this lens like a small car at launch. The optical block is a fast double-Gauss derivative, and you can feel where all that glass went. This is a heavy lens, front-heavy on any FD body, with a deep 72mm front.

The out-of-focus rendering is the payoff. Backgrounds melt into a soft wash, and the focus falloff from the eye to the ear in a tight headshot is the separation people travel a long way to get on 35mm. It is not flawless. Specular highlights can show the faint onion-ring structure typical of a ground aspherical element, so a string of streetlights behind your subject will not be perfectly creamy. For skin and soft light it disappears. Contrast wide open is moderate, which suits black-and-white portraiture and flatters color skin tones.

Flare resistance is the weak spot. Point it near a window or a backlit subject at f/1.2 and you will get veiling haze and the occasional green ghost, because there is a lot of air-to-glass surface and the coatings are 1970s Canon, not modern multilayer. Shade it with your hand or a proper hood and the problem mostly goes away. The other honest limitation is focus precision. At f/1.2 the depth of field at portrait distance is a sliver, and on a manual-focus FD body with a plain matte screen you will miss eyes until you learn the lens.

Who shoots it now: portrait and available-light people who want the FD look and refuse to pay Canon RF or Leica money for f/1.2. FD's short register means it adapts cleanly to mirrorless, so a whole generation of digital shooters rediscovered it. The rival in the same bag is the Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 AI-S, sharper wide open and better behaved into the light, but without quite the same falloff. People still reach for the Canon when they want the rendering more than the test chart.

One metering note. Shooting this wide open in low light is the whole reason you own it, which means you are often metering a dim scene at f/1.2 where a stop in either direction changes the picture. Meter the highlight you care about, usually the lit side of the face, and place it on purpose instead of trusting an averaged reading. Zone Light Meter lets you spot that highlight and set the zone, so the bloom lands where you want it and the lit cheek does not run white.