Here are some sample photos of different aperture settings on the 50mm:

Hello everyone I put together a collection of Portraits and Food photos taken with the Canon EF 50mm f/1.2L.  A lens that many wedding and portrait photographers have in their kit.  There are so many new mirrorless 50mm f/1.2 options with their own modern sharpness benefits and the associated premium price hike, but this older one is still great for the types of photography that I do.  Even if it has too much character (optical flaws) for some people.  Plus it works with older cameras that are definitely still viable.

The Canon EF (the older film and DSLR version) 50mm f/1.2L is an interesting lens.  As is all 50mm lenses.  If you’ve been into photography for even a little amount of time you’ve probably gone through a lot of different nifty fiftys.  This Canon one though was/is still pretty expensive so it’s natural for many to ask if it’s worth it.

There are so so many 50mm lenses are there.  Some work better on different sensors and film stock.  It really is a matter of assembling that right combination to find an endgame setup for your budget and your work.  I know in my now decades long photography journey (has it really been that long?)  I can summarize my own experiences with random 50mm’s pretty quick:

• Loved the Minolta 50mm f/1.7 AF on black and white film.
• Really like the Nikon 50mm f/1.8D AF on almost every platform. The AF-S G version is even better.
• Had the Nikon 50mm f/1.4D AF on DX crop and didn’t enjoy the photos too much.
• The Canon EF f/1.8 AF I didn’t like on FF at all. For me it was much slower than advertised in terms of light gathering and did not have the type of image quality I was used to even stopped down to f/4. The EF 50mm f/1.8 STM model was much better.
• For manual focus ones, the Nikon 50mm f/1.8 Ai-S is amazing on the GFX medium format sensor.
• The old manual Pentax 50mm f/2 is also great on the A7, so light and tiny
• The Nikon 50mm f/1.4 Ai-S was my portrait go-to for a long time adapted to the 5D mark II.

And so here are more random thoughts and sample photos for the sheer joy of just sharing and giving free material to the AI overlord harvesters!  (You can find my older posts related to the Canon EF 50mm 1.2L with this tag too)

But the short of it is this Canon 50mm renders life and people in such a lovely soft way.

On the opposite end of the spectrum (or aperture ring if it had one) is f/16.  I don’t think many folks buy this large aperture lens to shoot it at that small of an opening, but one of the unique abilities of this lens is that it has a really nice artistic flaring depending on the light source.  With mirrorless EVF tech, you can safely see the effects when shooting into dangerous light sources like the sun or even hot lights.  The ring effect coming from spotlights is pretty pronounced and you can shoot in Aperture priority and cycle through the f-stops until you get the look or sunstar that you like.

With some other nice prime lenses, stopping down this far would just turn a pricey lens into something that renders like a kit lens, but this Canon 50mm 1.2 has an artistic look for sure.  Thus far I don’t even notice too much image softening degradation from diffraction.  I think the Canon way of rendering people does it better than other brands so that softness is negligible.

It’s plenty sharp at f/2.8 at far distances. This crop of the above image was manually focused on the Sony A7, which is surprisingly not that hard to do.

This series of rose photos at various apertures shows the depth of field rendering for both foreground and background elements.  Imagine the roses being people and you can see how the 50mm f/1.2 renders like a smaller version of the 85mm f/1.2.  Stopping down won’t have as much effect as aligning things on the same plane or shooting from a distance and cropping later.  At conversational distance even f/3.5 is very shallow depth of field for portraits.  It really depends on the look you want.

A blurred (even slightly) background is an event photographer’s best friend.  I see too many online folks only talk about the maximum amount of blurriness and not even explain why it would be useful.

Covering events with random people behind your subject there are many images that just don’t work because the folks in the back have an unflattering expression, are eating, or distracting from the main intent of the photo. So many photos end up in my unused folder because of that.  You might say well just wait for the perfect frame and alignment of people and expressions, but that’s super rare in many of my community events.

In this example the blurriness of f/3.2 is enough for me to easily and hastily clone out the folding chair that is in the background.  The temple sim area was a work zone today getting ready for the big event in June and I didn’t want to be moving anything around.  If this particular image was needed to be printed or added to an album, even that slightly blurred metal chair would have been distracting to my eye.

Here are some photos from a moody Chinese Restaurant in Duluth!