Will Robb Photography

Last week I treated myself to a new toy, a canon 50mm f 1.2L lens. A very early Xmas gift.

Canon has three 50mm prime lenses, the f 1.8, f 1.4 and the f 1.2L. The 1.8 retails new for about 9000 yen here and it is fairly sharp. On the down side, it’s very light (130′grams), it feels like a toy, the build quality isn’t good and in no time at all it will have dust inside if it’s being used a lot. Also, when autofocusing it is pretty noisy. It’s OK for a beginners lens or as a back up just in case something goes wrong with one of the better 50mm lenses in my opinion. Next, the f1.4, middle of the group in terms of build quality and price (new for about 39′000 yen), but it is a damn good lens. Sharp as a tack, decent build quality and pretty light weight (about 290g). It’s quite quick to focus, isn’t as noisy in the auto focus as the 1.4 but predictably not as quiet as the 1.2L. I have used a couple of f1.4 lens before, the first I got second hand pretty cheap a while back, but it had some dust in it so a couple of years ago I got a new one which I didn’t use much and ended up selling it to Fil who sometimes leaves a comment here (hope the lens is still doing well for you Fil). Anyway, after selling it to Fil I found a lot of situations where I really was needing a prime lens again, mostly for portraits in low light situations where my f 2.8 lenses were just that little bit too slow. I had toyed with the idea of getting another f 1.4 again, I had heard some negative things about the F 1.2L, but after a bit of thought and a bit of a play with both lenses I went for the f 1.2L.

It’s not the cheapest bit of glass out there, here in Japan it retails for about 165′000 yen in the big chain stores, but I managed to pick it up new for about 130′000 in Fujiya Camera in Nakano. I had been looking for it second hand for a while, I did find one in good condition for 125′000 yen, but I thought why bother about saving 5000 yen for something second hand with a 14 day warranty when I could pay the extra for a new lens with a years warranty on it. On the downside it’s the most expensive of the 50mm lenses, it’s the heaviest (560g), it’s not great for focusing at it’s minimum focal length of about 40cm (it is well documented as back focusing slightly with auto focus at this length, but is OK when focused manually) and for these reasons many people go with the f 1.4. I think that’s fair enough really, so what prompted me to buy the 1.2L? Performance and durability.

The much touted weight issue isn’t a problem for me, my camera bodies are heavy and I like having heavy lenses to balance that out, with some of the lighter EOS cameras I could see how the weight would be a big problem. My L series zoom lenses weigh between 800 grams and 1.5 Kilos, so actually it’s pretty light for me whilst it still feels solid and I prefer that. It makes things more stable for me when I am lining up hand held shots. At f 1.2-2.8 it out performs the other 50 mm primes (though from f2.8 through f5.6 the f 1.4 50mm prime comes out slightly better) giving absolutely amazing back ground blur. It’s the fastest and quietest in terms of focus of all the primes and this is majorly important for me. On Sunday when I was working whisky live (which I will blog about it soon) I had to do a lot of impromptu portrait sessions with the high flyers of the whisky trade from Scotland and Japan and I couldn’t make people hang around for long to sort out positions and lighting etc, I just had to work around where they were, focus quickly and accurately and rattle off about 20 shots in a few seconds with the help of my flash and it was great in those situations. Also it was very quiet which was useful as sometimes the people I had to photograph were being interviewed by the TV cameras or writers, in those situations when you are working round other people it’s good to not disturb anyone else and a loud lens whirring next to a TV camera or a mic isn’t going to win you many friends. Perhaps the most important factor in my decision to buy it was the build quality. It is weather sealed to help keep moisture and dust out (you have to buy a weather proof lens protector to finish this off and I did) and with this element of the lens I expect to be getting a good 8-10 years of solid use out of it. With my last two jobs paying for it I have already recovered the cost and then some, from now on it’s just going to be another quality piece of equipment at my disposal which will help keep my clients happy…fingers crossed anyway.

Anyway, here’s a couple of snaps I took of it. These shots weren’t with a macro lens, just my 24-70 lens with a x2 magnifying filter.