Canon New FD 50mm f/1.2

Shoot a backlit portrait at f/1.2 and the highlights bloom, contrast drops, and the face sits inside a soft halo. That glow is why this lens still has a following. Stopped down it cleans up fast, but most people who hunt one down are after the wide-open look, the same quality a sharper modern fifty has to fake with a diffusion filter. It sits below the aspherical New FD 50mm f/1.2 L, which adds an aspheric element for tighter correction. The standard version is cheaper and renders more softly at full aperture, which suits some shooters fine.

The design is a fast double-Gauss, the usual answer for a 50 of this speed, and it behaves the way that formula does. At f/1.2 it is dreamy and low in contrast, with visible spherical aberration smearing the highlights. By f/2.8 the glow burns off and the center snaps to genuinely crisp. Close to f/5.6 and you have a clean, contrasty fifty that holds across the frame. Bokeh stays smooth and round near the middle, with cat-eye stretching toward the corners wide open, because optical vignetting clips the off-axis light cones at full aperture.

This was a late FD lens, made between 1980 and 1993 for the New FD breech-free bayonet. It was a contemporary of bodies like the New F-1 and A-1. Today it lives adapted to mirrorless far more than on film, and the reason is purely mechanical. Adapting FD to most other SLR mounts needs a corrective glass element to reach infinity, while mirrorless short-flange bodies take it cleanly with a simple spacer. Sony and Fuji shooters cross-shop it against the Nikkor 50mm f/1.2 AI-S and the fast Minolta Rokkor fifties. The Canon usually wins on price for the rendering you get back.

The honest weakness is flare. Point it at a bright source wide open and contrast collapses, with veiling haze across the frame and the occasional green ghost. It carries Canon's multi-coating, but a fast double-Gauss with this much glass still scatters light, and the f/1.2 L's aspherical element buys tighter wide-open correction than the standard design can manage. Use a hood and keep the sun out of the frame when you want punch.

The 52mm filter thread is the small one Canon standardized across most of its fifties, so secondhand NDs and grads are cheap and everywhere. One thing to remember when you meter: the f/1.2 reading Zone Light Meter gives you is the aberrated, low-contrast image, not the stopped-down one. In low light, meter wide open to place your shadows where you want them, then decide whether you actually want the glow or whether stopping to f/2 buys back the contrast. The exposure brightness is the same either way. The look is not, and that is the whole reason to reach for this lens instead of something newer.