Hasselblad / Zeiss Planar F 110mm f/2

A studio in winter, north light coming in flat and gray, a Hasselblad 2000FCW on a tripod with the 110mm hung off the front. The shooter racks focus to the model's near eye at f/2 and the far eye is already soft. That is the whole reason this lens exists. On 6x6 a 110mm gives roughly the field of a 60mm on full-frame, a normal to short-portrait length, and at f/2 it throws a slice of focus so thin you have to commit to one eye and let the rest fall away. The out-of-focus rendering is smooth and round, no harsh edges on the disks, no nervous double-line bokeh in the foliage behind a head. It draws people the way Zeiss Planars are supposed to.

This is the F-series lens, the focal-plane one, built for the 2000-series bodies that carried their own focal-plane shutter. No leaf shutter in the barrel, which is why it could open to f/2 in the first place. The C and CF lenses with built-in Compur shutters topped out around f/2.8 or slower because the leaf-shutter blades cannot clear a huge aperture fast enough. Drop the shutter from the lens, hand timing to the body, and Zeiss could build a genuinely fast medium-format Planar. It is a double-Gauss design and behaves like one. A little soft and slightly lower in contrast wide open, corners trailing the center, then snapping to clinical sharpness across the frame by f/4 to f/5.6. Stopped down on a tripod it will resolve more than most film can hold.

Who reaches for it: portrait and fashion shooters who own a focal-plane Hasselblad and want subject isolation that no leaf-shutter V lens can match. It is not a travel lens. The thing is heavy, the 70mm filter thread is expensive to feed, and you are tied to the 2000FC, 2000FCW, or one of the other focal-plane bodies. The 110 only works on a fraction of the V system, so anyone shooting a 500-series leaf-shutter body cannot mount it at all, and the focal-plane bodies themselves are fussy and pricey on the used market.

Flare control is good for the era but not bulletproof. Backlight a subject with the sun near the frame edge and you can pull a little veiling haze that lifts the blacks, so use the proper shade. Field curvature is mild and rarely an issue at portrait distances. The real practical catch is metering at f/2 in dim available light, where your depth of field is paper-thin and a third of a stop of exposure error reads instantly on a face. Meter the skin tone you actually care about and place it deliberately. In Zone Light Meter, drop that midtone where you want it and let the app hold the placement instead of trusting an averaged reading off a dark studio.

Today it trades as a specialist's lens, well into four figures clean, and the people who buy it know exactly why. There is no real cross-shop. If you want f/2 on a square negative with the Zeiss look, this is the only Hasselblad that gives it to you.