Canon FD 50mm F3.5 Macro
Inside the tiny world of this little vintage macro lens
Canon FD 50mm F3.5 S.S.C. Macro on my EOS R @ F3.5
What I always found interesting about my personal tastes was although I had owned my very own camera since I was 16 (Nikon D90) I had never once been interested in the idea of owning a macro lens. Which is weird because I’ve read from multiple sources (various photography website surveys) that the 2nd most purchased lens after buying a camera kit after a fast nifty-fifty lens in actually a macro lens of some sort.
Although what might be part to blame was the fact that I was always buying lenses and camera around the idea of video/moving picture capture so when you are starting out and even in film school; buying your own gear, you do what any student has to do with their budget on a daily basis, you prioritize! Well in all my past cases of owning a camera and lenses was really to aid in my capture of motion while in film school, and to be frank the idea of making more than one film about the macro world of ants kinda didn’t appeal to me. So over the years this was something that I was never on my radar to buy.
Canon FD 50mm F3.5 S.S.C. Macro on my EOS R @ F3.5
Fast forward to late 2018 shortly after the announcement of the EOS R, and after I first held one in my hand, I subsequently made the choice to pick one up after finally making the decision to own a full frame digital camera! After all these years of shooting with old Canon FD lenses for years on almost all my cameras and then seeing what those same lenses looked like in all their “full frame” glory, something in me just decided I needed to explore more, what did all these vintage lenses look like edge to edge? I wanted to get the “full monty” of what these beautiful 1970’s pieces of glass looked like on a high resolution digital sensor. After trying on every FD lens I owned something inside me wanted more. So I did it, I bought the only type of “somewhat typical” lens I hadn’t owned yet, a macro.
I found what turned out to indeed a pretty mint copy of the trusty Canon FD 50mm F3.5 Macro S.S.C. on the most venerable of online shopping sites, eBay. The copy I purchased was in the very typical price range of just under $100. The lens even came with the original Canon box from the 1970’s which I though was pretty neat. My copy was in excellent physical and optical condition, a prime specimen to test out its resolving power at 30 megapixels of resolution.
Canon FD 50mm F3.5 S.S.C. Macro on my EOS R @ F3.5
The lens has a beautiful focus throw down to just 8.1” so 2 : 1 or half-life size. The construction is very typical old FD with a high quality metal construction with a small optical block in the back consisting of just 6 elements in 4 groups. On the aperture barrel the markings jump from F3.5 to F5.6 with just a single detent on the rig denoting some unknown in-between value. The 6 mildly-curved aperture blades provides a rather obvious hexagonal bokeh at moderate apertures. But optically this lens seems to have some pretty impressive chops as far as resolving power and overall image quality goes. I was quite impressed by the level of detail and resolution the lens was able to provide, the level of micro-contrast is quite impressive for a 1970’s lens. Even wide open details were sharp and well resolved even wide open. Another surprising take-away was the lack of any notable type of chromatic aberration and the absolutely gorgeous out of focus rendition in both directions of the field of focus. This lack of any type of Spherochromatism - a form of longitudinal chromatic aberration - makes for the wonderful “smoothness” in the blurs of out focus renderings.. As you can see there is no doubt the lens is quite sharp but “richness” in which the lens renders detail as well as how it transitions into seemingly just a blur of nothingness is actually quite intoxicating.
