Hasselblad / Zeiss Planar FE 110mm f/2

f/2 across a 6x6 frame is a genuinely large hole, and on a 56mm-wide negative it buys you depth of field measured in millimeters at portrait distance. That is the entire reason this lens exists. Zeiss could only open the aperture this far by moving the shutter out of the lens and into the camera body, and the bodies that do that are the focal-plane Hasselblads almost nobody outside the system remembers. This particular version, the FE, is the electronic one. It arrived in the early 1990s and ran to 2006, built to talk to the metering 200-series bodies (the 203 FE, the 205 TCC and FCC) over a data bus. An earlier f/2 of the same optical recipe, the non-electronic F lens, had shipped back in 1977 on the 2000 FC, but it had no contacts and no automation. The FE is the revision with the brain.

The FE in the name is the tell. No leaf shutter, electronic contacts to feed the meter, and total dependence on the body's curtain. The 2000-series cameras ran a titanium-foil focal-plane shutter that dented if you looked at it wrong; the later 200 series swapped in a tougher cloth curtain to fix exactly that. Either way the lens carries no shutter of its own, which is why the spec sheet lists none.

What it renders is why people still hunt these down. The double-Gauss Planar gives you a flat, even field and contrast that holds wide open in a way most fast glass cannot manage. Faces read as solid and three-dimensional rather than flattened out. Behind the subject the background drops away into a soft, quiet blur that stays calm and untroubled at the edges. Stop down to f/4 or f/5.6 and the center sharpens up hard while the falloff stays gentle. It is a portrait lens first. The honest complaint, the one every owner makes, is that focus at f/2 on 120 film is brutal. Miss the eye by an inch and the frame is soft, and there is no autofocus to bail you out.

Living on focal-plane bodies costs you the thing 500-series shooters take for granted: flash sync at any speed. The leaf-shuttered CF lenses sync to 1/500. This one syncs only as fast as the body's curtain allows, often down around 1/90. Studio strobists who want quick sync with movement either stay in the 500 system or eat the limit. That is the deal you sign for f/2.

Today the FE 110 sits in the expensive, sought-after corner of the V system, cross-shopped against the leaf-shuttered 100mm f/3.5 and the 120 Makro-Planar by people choosing between speed and sync. It carries a premium because the 200-series bodies were never cheap and the lens was always rare. Buyers accept the focal-plane-only constraint to get that f/2 separation on a big negative, which nothing in the 500 lineup can touch.

Wide open is also where exposure gets tight, so meter for the shadow you actually care about rather than trusting an averaged reading off a bright background. Zone Light Meter lets you spot the skin tone, place it on the zone you want, and read the f/2 shutter speed straight off, which keeps you from blowing out a face when the scene behind it is much brighter.