Canon New FD 28mm f/2.8

Set this lens to f/8, prefocus to about two meters, and you can shoot a whole afternoon without ever touching the focus ring again. At 28mm with the aperture closed down, depth of field runs from roughly a meter to past the far end of the street, so the picture is sharp before you raise the camera. That is the situation this lens owns. A fast fifty makes you nail focus on a moving subject in a fraction of a second and you miss half of them. A 35mm gets you close but not quite to the hyperfocal sweet spot a 28 gives you. Zone-focused and shot blind from the hip, this is the lens that catches the thing you only saw out of the corner of your eye.

It is a retrofocus design, which every SLR wide has to be to clear the swinging mirror, and Canon had been making an FD 28mm f/2.8 since the mid-1970s by the time the New FD version arrived in 1979. The New FD redesign is not a new mount. It keeps the breech-lock principle and adds a one-twist bayonet feel, so you mount it with a flick instead of spinning a ring. The barrel went mostly black plastic and the whole thing got lighter, light enough that it disappears on the front of an A-1 or an AE-1. Optically the late coatings handle contre-jour better than the older single-coated copies, though you can still pull a ghost or two pointing straight into the sun. Hood it and stop thinking about it.

Stopped to f/8 it is sharp and even across the frame, the quiet kind of performance that makes it a happy landscape and travel lens as much as a street one. Wide open at f/2.8 the corners soften and contrast eases off. Distortion is very well controlled, near straight at normal and infinity distances, with only a touch of bending creeping in at the closest focus, so horizons and building edges hold their lines on a landscape. Color is neutral, very slightly cool, the standard Canon FD signature, and it scans and prints without a fuss. Bokeh is not the point at this focal length; you rarely throw a 28mm background far enough out to argue about rendering.

The honest weakness is speed. f/2.8 is fine for an overcast afternoon or a lit interior, but it is not a low-light tool. For available-dark work people step up to the f/2 version of this lens or grab a faster normal. If you want a wider take on the same scene, a 24mm opens the angle further, though you give up the easy hyperfocal trick that makes the 28 so quick to work with.

Today it sits at the cheap end of the FD pile, usually the second lens someone buys after the kit fifty, and the common cross-shop is the Nikkor 28mm f/2.8 AI-S, which is crisper wide open and costs noticeably more. People still buy the Canon because it is small, light, and gets out of the way for pocket money. The 52mm filter thread is a common FD size, so a polarizer or a yellow or red filter for black-and-white is easy to keep parked on the front. When one is screwed on, dial that factor into Zone Light Meter so your reading already subtracts the light the glass is eating. A red filter runs about three stops, and the app folds it into the metered exposure instead of leaving you counting in your head on a street corner.