Canon New FD 85mm f/1.8

Eighty-five millimeters, f/1.8, light enough to hand-hold all afternoon. It is the focal length you use when you cannot walk closer and you do not want the subject to notice you. Half a step back from the altar, focus on the eyes, and the pew rows behind dissolve into nothing. For decades this was the second lens out of the bag for anyone shooting people on a Canon body, the one you reached for once the 50mm could not do the job.

Canon built the New FD line in 1979 as a redesign of the older breech-lock FD glass, same optical heritage but lighter barrels and a reworked mount. The mount is still a breech-lock; Canon just changed how it operates, so you twist the whole barrel on like a bayonet instead of spinning a separate locking ring. This 85mm carries essentially the older FD 85/1.8 S.S.C. formula forward, and it is the quiet workhorse of the family. Not the f/1.2 aspherical halo lens that collectors chase and pay stupid money for, just the f/1.8 that thousands of people actually shot. Wide open it is soft and a little glowy, with visible chromatic aberration fringing the high-contrast edges, the kind of gentle softness that sits well on a face. It crisps up by f/2.8 and is genuinely sharp by f/4 to f/5.6, with the contrast Canon tuned its color glass for through the 1980s.

The bokeh is the reason it survives. Out-of-focus highlights render as clean, rounded discs at full aperture, and the transition from sharp to soft is gentle, no harsh edge where the plane of focus quits. A short telephoto wide open, doing the one thing you bought it to do: compress the face and lift it cleanly off the background. It is a portrait lens first and an everything-else lens second.

Flare control is better than you would expect from glass this old, because the New FD range standardized Canon's Super Spectra multi-coating across the line. Point it at a window or a streetlamp and it holds contrast far better than the single-coated lenses of the previous decade. The front element does sit fairly exposed behind that 52mm thread, so a hood is ordinary good practice rather than optional if you are working near the sun. None of this is a defect; it is just how you treat any fast lens with an exposed front element.

Today it trades cheap, often cheaper than the nifty-fifty buyers expect, because Canon moved to the EOS and EF mount in 1987 and wound the FD system down over the next few years. The 52mm thread is shared across much of the FD kit, which is handy if you already own filters. People cross-shop it against the Nikon 85mm f/2 and the Minolta MD 85mm, and on rendering it holds its own against both. Adapt it to mirrorless and you have a featherweight portrait lens; mount it on a film body and you get available-light shooting at full aperture without much fuss.

One metering note. Wide open at f/1.8 this lens is happiest in the low light it was built for, so meter for the shadows you actually care about and let the highlights fall. Zone Light Meter handles that spot read, and if you are placing a face on Zone VI in a dim church you want the reading off the cheek, not the candle behind it.