Canon EF 85mm Lens - EF 85mm F/1.2L USM

The EF 85mm f/1.2L USM is a professional L series lens. Canon calls it their "definitive portraiture lens", and it is often considered to be one of the best portrait lenses ever made.

The optical engineer at Canon who designed this lens design was a fashion photographer, and his intention was to design a lens that would be the ultimate lens for fashion photography. This required a completely new design independent from Canon's previous 85mm lens designs. A new element was placed in the lens to give bokeh that was unlike any of the other lens that existed. This new large element required a new clutched electronic manual focusing mechanism that does not exist on any other lenses to handle the specialized element. When it finally hit the market, it was the only lens in the industry that was explicitly designed for fashion photography.

It is the longer of the only two f/1.2 lenses Canon makes, other being the 50mm f/1.2L USM. This lens is constructed with a metal body and mount, and with rubber gripping and plastic extremities. It features a wide rubber focusing ring and a distance window with infrared index.

Featuring a circular 8-blade diaphragm, and a maximum aperture of f/1.2. This lens is capable of maintaining sharpness and image quality at low apertures. The lens' depth of field allows distinct focus on the subject, while providing a beautiful bokeh. The optical construction of this lens contains 8 lens elements, including one ground and polished aspherical lens element, which makes this lens extremely sharp when stopped down to about f/2. This lens uses a floating front extension focusing system, powered by a ring type USM motor. Auto focus speed of this lens is on the slow side when compared to most ring USM lenses, and photographing fast moving targets can be quite challenging with this lens. Manual focusing is done by wire: this lens does not have a direct mechanical connection to the focusing ring, but instead detects the rotation of the focusing ring and uses the autofocus motor to drive the lens elements. While full-time manual focus is available, the lens can not be focused when the camera is off. The front of the lens does not rotate, but does extend when focusing.