Personal Awesomeness:

A few years ago I wrote a blog post about Canon’s 85mm 1.2L lens after I’d rented it for a job. It is a sweet lens, but it comes at a high price. I had put off buying one for myself – renting one as needed – due to that high price. Finally, I bought the much cheaper  Canon 85mm 1.8 when a friend offered to sell me his nearly new one at a good price. My thought was that the 1.2 was really nice, but not nice enough to pay almost $1800 more for than the 1.8 – because the 1.8 version is pretty great (more on that later).

Before I go on, I should give a little backstory on who Don is to me: Don is an electrical engineer that has had a professional level of knowledge in photography since he worked with my dad in Germany when I lived there as a kid. Don picked up on my ability in photography when I was in grade school and ended up giving my dad a like new Canon T70 camera body, with a 28mm and 1oomm prime lens to go with it and asked him to give it all to me for Christmas that year. I was in fourth grade, and it was the best Christmas gift I’ve ever received. My dad tried to pay him for it, but he told him to just give the money to the church. This was the start of my dream of being a professional photographer. I use to ride my bike around with that camera around my neck and photograph weird stuff – I guess because I was weird myself.  In 1991 we left Germany and I quit shooting because we quit traveling.

My old Canon T70 along with the Canon 28mm 2.8, 100mm 2.8, and 85mm 1.2 FD mount lenses. All of which were given to me by Don.

Fast-forward about 12 years. I was in college and stumbled upon photography again through doing portraits of an ex girlfriend. I shot those portraits with that same Canon T70 and 100mm portrait lens he had given me years before. It was through this that  I discovered my calling in life – photography. I got in contact with Don to let him know I had gotten back into photography and to get his insight on things. As a result, Don sent me numerous photography books, a medium format camera, and even a darkroom set up in the mail right after that. Now, 13 years or so after that, he has sent me this lens that I can do amazing things with. And I will. I don’t think Don would ever except money from me for it, so, I think the best way to thank him or pay him back for his generosity, is to be generous to others with it. I will use that lens to make beautiful portraits for my Portraits for Prayer project; I will use it to create images for a series I plan to do to help others out in marriage, and I will use it when I occasionally do shoots for people that I know could never afford to pay me. I feel that me doing such things is worth more than any amount of money I could give him for his generosity. Don, I will create something beautiful with all that you have given me.

Technical Awesomeness:

The Canon 85mm 1.2L  (whether it be the old FD manual focus version, or the current EOS mount version) has the ability give images a surreal like nature due to the extreme shallow depth of field you get when shooting at f1.2. The shallow depth of field can show things – or people (it’s a portrait lens) to the viewer of the image in a way that we never could see with our naked eye. It can draw all of the viewers attention to the details on the surface of somebody’s face and only those details because everything else goes out of focus. We can never see things this way with our naked eye because as soon as we shift our attention (or our focus) to something else, like the persons ear, then that becomes sharp. Shift it back to their mouth and that’s  instantly sharp and the ear goes out of focus. So the images created with these lenses allow us to see the whole picture, literally, of a person (or object) while directing their attention to specific details through everything else being out of focus. That’s what makes them so appealing to photographers, because they give the photographer the ability to create portraits that will almost always be appealing to the viewer due to simply showing people to others in a way that they never have seen them before.

Shot with the Canon T70 and 85mm 1.2L lens using Kodak Portra 160 film. It was shot at f1.2 at 1/500th of a second using available light in front of gray seamless paper.

As you can see, it gave me excellent results. But to continue using it I would need to start shooting film on a regular basis. I do love film, and may continue to shoot some with it, but I needed a way of mounting the lens to my current EOS camera bodies. Enter the Vello Canon FD Lenses To Canon EOS Body Lens Adapter. This little device does exactly what it says it does, and it does it pretty well for the price you pay for it. There are a couple of drawbacks to it however: You lose one stop of aperture using it, which turns the lens into a 1.8 rather than a 1.2. And, it can be difficult to focus with the current EOS screens designed for autofocus lenses. As you close down your aperture your viewfinder gets darker making it very difficult to focus quickly when at smaller apertures. Other reviews I read said that the adapter made things a little soft, but I couldn’t tell in my experiment with it as long as I was at f2.8 or higher. There also is a magnification factor of 1.25, so when using it with the 85mm you actually have a 106mm. To me this is actually a perk since I do a lot of portrait work.To experiment with the combination, I got mt friend, and Atlanta based fashion designer and seamstress, Nancy, out in the snowstorm we had here in Atlanta last week and did some portraits of her – shooting everything at f1.2. I love what I got, despite them not being “technically” correct since they’re a little soft. They have a very ethereal nature to them that I love.

Mt favorite of all I got of her because I feel like it captures here personality more than any of the others.

 

Rather than worrying so much about getting the focus right on, I decided to go the other way and throw it completely off on purpose for a few shots. This was my favorite of those.

And I think this one wins out as being the best from a purely photographic standpoint. I love the colors in it. Her hunter green jacket with burgundy gloves – and the white hat and scarf. It all just works. It was a completely impromptu photo shoot, She had no warning, but it still came out great. A combination of luck and good looks / fashion sense on her part.

After I saw these shots, I was curious as to whether their softness was user error (my focus being off), the adapter, the lens itself, or a combination of the three. So, I shot the following Tony Robbins desk calendar with both the 85mm FD 1.2L with the Vello Lens adapter on my Canon EOS and with the current Canon 85mm 1.8. With both lenses I had the camera on a tripod in mirror lock up mode, and used a cable release. There was no other way to get it any sharper other than shooting with strobe at a lower ISO. I was at ISO 800 I believe. I put the first “N” in Anthony in the center of the viewfinder and focused on it and shot it at various apertures with both lenses to find out what the limits of sharpness for both lenses were. Here are the results:

Edit: The calendar is an A frame desk calendar. So the bottom of it is a little closer to the lens, and the top is little further from the lens than the point I focused on, which was the first “N” in “Anthony.” This shows the extremely shallow depth of field both lenses give you when wide open. All it takes is your subject swaying a bit to throw off the focus of your shot, so when shooting wide open with such a lens, tell them they better hold still or there will be hell to pay. That should keep your shot in focus and get a genuine smile out of them — as long as they’re not your mother, your preacher, or your boss.

So, as you can see, shooting at the smallest apertures with the adapter gives everything a hazy dream like look. It stays this way until you hit f2.8

I’d love to for anybody that knows why the lens suddenly decides to wake up and get sharp at f2.8 when shooting with the Vello lens adapter, but it does. Huge difference.

f16 is the smallest aperture for the Canon 85mm FD 1.2L and it did soften up a bit at that point with the adapter, but over all it was still reasonably sharp.

So here is the Canon 85mm 1.8 — a $400 lens. Notice how sharp the first N in Anthony is, which was the focal point. For those of you that don’t know, as a general rule lenses aren’t going to be sharp when shooting wide open or closed all the way down and they’re at their sharpest in the f5.6 to f11 range. So, the consistent sharpness of this lens throughout its aperture (see the following two shots) range impressed me. It’s a great lens for the money.

So, to wrap it all up, I’m sure the FD 1.2L is capable of being sharp at f1.2 if shooting it on a film camera like it was made for, but it certainly isn’t on the modern EOS bodies with the Vello adapter. That doesn’t mean you can’t still do some really nice looking work with it – as shown in the shots I did of Nancy. This soft look would be great for getting a dream like feel when desired. Think baby portraits, high key portraits, boudoir photography – or -photographing a friend out in a snowstorm in the freezing cold. It will give you sharp and “professional” results, but you have to be at f2.8 or smaller for that to happen as shown by the test shots I did of the calendar with it. The 85mm 1.8: What a great lens for the price.  The thing is sharp throughout its range of aperture and the autofocus on it is FAST – faster than I recall the autofocus on the 85mm 1.2L being – and it’s much lighter. The downside of it is that it simply is not a 1.2. That extra stop just makes a difference and gives a look that you can’t get out of the 1.8. Enough of a difference to pay $1800 more for? That depends on the job and the photographer.

Creating great work is not about the gear. Don’t let a lack of ideal gear be an excuse for not creating work you’re happy with. But the right gear for the job can certainly help make life easier for you as a photographer. Thanks for making my life easier, Don.