Canon 85mm/1.2L

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This is a photo of my daughter Dana. I used a Canon T90 camera with

a Canon 85mm/1.2L lens. Light is provided by window.

nice shot...looks a touch soft...do you remember aperture/shutter speed? i ask because i'm interested in purchasing this lens and haven't seen many examples of it wide open...i'm guessing this shot is wide open due to the softness of focus. do you have any other examples you can post? i'd be interested to see.

 

how do you like the lens overall? if other posts are any guide, i'm guessing you love it!

 

thanks for the sample.

David,

I have double checked the slide, and now I am sure that it is not taken with the 85mm/1.2L which is tack sharp wide open. This one was taken with a Contessa camera. The 85mm/1.2L will give you amazingly sharp and contrasty photos.

This one was taken with the 85mm/1.2L lens. Excuse the "dirt" on the slide scan. I hope you like the sharpness.

 

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You can see every blemish ... not so great for older people portraits.

Very nice photos! I am not fortunate enough to possess an 85 mm f 1.2 lens, which seems to win universal praise. But I do own a Zeiss Contessa 35 with a 2.8 Tessar lens. The Tessar lens has a reputation for resolution and sharpness, and I give testimony to those attributes.

Sorry to be a killjoy but neither of these shots impresses me that much. I have had simmilar results from kit lenses. I am sure it is something to do with web posting, scanning, etc but an expensive L lens should look better than that.

Geoff, Thre first photo is not taken by the 85mm/1.2L and it is not meant to "impress" anyone here.

Excellent photos. I prefer softness on portrait shots.

Soo, I also was looking for less sharpness when taking the first photo. I could have used a macro lens for tack-sharpness, but a slightly softer portrait of a little girl is more appealing to me. Shooting against the light had to result in loss of contrast. I used Fujichrome Velvia ASA50. I use some older lenses on purpose. Old means over 40 years old.

Here is an example of the 85 1.2L @ 1.2, handheld.

You can see how narrow your dof can be. I feel that the 85 1.2 is a little softer wide open. It is super sharp at 2.8 and smaller.

In this picture you can see that the plane of focus is actually closer to the nose than exactly on the eyes, about 1" at 3 feet away, it can be tricky to focus wide open. This shot was taken with Kodak Tech pan, the print shows an incredible amount more detail than this scan.

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Buzz: I often use the 85mm lens at 2.0 to get sharp results with a background thats out of focus.

Raid: The I'm not saying its not sharp at 2.0, but at 1.2 it is a little soft and that SUPER sharpness that it is renowned for is not really evident until it is stopped down a little. It is my favorite lens, and the only others that I have that compare in sharpness, color and contrast are the 300 f4L, and the 80-200 f4L(which is relly fantastic itself).

Buzz: I have the 80-200/4L lens, and I agree that it is a very sharp lens. I also find the 500mm/4.5L razor sharp. I read somewhere that Nikon users had Canon 500 lenses custom adjusted to fit Nikon cameras in the past. As for the 85mm lens, it is of course a super lens by any standard. My other two lenses that I find very sharp is a Vivitar 90mm-180mm macro flat field zoom and a 70-210/3.5 zoom lens by the French lens maker Angeneiux. Both truely are fine lenses.

This photo was taken with the standard non-L 80-200/4 Canon zoom. It also is very sharp, and I really did not need the 80-200/4L lens, but I read so many good reports about its performance and I found a good deal. <br>

 

This is a bedouin in the Jordanian desert ruin city Petra. <br>

 

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<br> Canon F1N with Fujichrome 50.

That 85mm f1.2 is on a wish list - but man, its E X P E N S I V E!!!

On the other hand - the 80-200 f4 "L" has to be biggest bang for the buck in the entire "L" line-up! And man... what a tack sharp lens!!!

And amazingly, there is no real fall off at the extremes of the zoom range (that you can see with a naked eye, so please spare me the line per mm anal-retentive lab stuff)

I bought many years ago the very expensive Angeneiux 70-210 zoom, expecting the get the very best zoom out there. Earlier this year I saw a comparison between that lens and the Canon 80-200/4L. The canon is slightly sharper than the Angeneiux. I was surprised that a much less expensive lens could have such high performance.

>nice shot...looks a touch soft...

 

At f/1.2, this lens isn't up to peak sharpness, but still pretty sharp. Things improve at f/1.4 and f/1.6, and by f/1.8, you're getting some very scarily sharp images.

 

However, one thing that can ruin pictures (and, in fact, ruined quite a few of mine the first time I used one of these lenses) is the fact that depth of field is extremely shallow - at f/1.2, if a person isn't exactly square to the camera, you can't even keep both eyes in focus. Because of that, even a slight movement of either the subject or the photographer means that you're no longer focussed where you want to be. The fact that the hair in the top-middle of her head appears nicely focussed would suggest something along those lines as a possibility.

 

steve

Here's one with the FD 85mm f/1.2 L, shot at about f/5.6 (if I recall correctly) on Fuji NPS.<br><br>

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I've only had the lens a couple of months, but I'm very pleased so far. It's quite sharp, gives great color rendition, and can be used for extremely narrow DOF.

ari, i love that image! her pose is wonderful and the depth of field is exquisite! if it was at f5.6 you must have been pretty close to minimum focus distance, as the depth of field is quite shallow; was that the case?

 

she makes me smile!

Thanks David! She's my daughter (20 months in this picture) and she just slays me with her quiet little expressions.

 

I may have been open a stop wider than f/5.6, but you're right -- I was shooting nearly at the minimum focusing distance, which is about 1 meter for this lens IIRC.