Wedding Photography with Canon’s 85/1.2
[This article was first published on my web site in 2004.]
Bambi Cantrell’s The Art of Wedding Photography, Professional Techniques With Style (Watson-Guptill, 2000) gets deservedly high ratings onAmazon.com and contains a great deal of useful information. The photographs in the book are inspiring and instructive, and most of them include shooting data. One of the lenses Bambi recommends is the Canon 85 mm f1.2 lens.
Introduced in September 1989, the lens is a rather old design in Canon’s EOS system. With its large maximum aperture of f/1.2, it is the fastest 85mm telephoto lens in its class. Like the discontinued 50 mm f1.0, it is one of the lenses that helped distinguish Canon’s EF lens line. Most photographic manufacturers simply don’t make lenses that are this fast.
But with a street price of approximately $1,500, this is a lens that requires some deliberation before purchase. Canon also offers a one-stop-slower 85 mm f1.8 lens, that is extremely good for portraits and weddings, at a fraction of the price. The 1.2 is heavy, more than double the weight of the 1.8. So, is the 1.2 worth the extra money and weight?
The answer, of course, is that it depends. I had been using the quick-focusing 85/1.8 and my first impression of the 85/1.2 was that it was very slow to focus – it is easily the slowest focusing of my lenses. This slow auto-focus is apparently due to combination of older auto-focus technology and heavy glass. Canon’s more recent big lenses focus very quickly by comparison. This lens could certainly benefit from an updated auto-focus system.
Getting past the size, the weight and the slow auto-focus, the lens offers one striking justification for its existence: images made at or close to f1.2. The wide aperture allows the photographer to shoot with a higher shutter speed in low light, permitting some photographs to be made hand-held when a tripod would otherwise be required. Photojournalism often requires that the photographer be unobtrusive and be able to move quickly to be in the right place at the right time. While essential for many types of photography, a tripod is hardly unobtrusive and often kills spontaneity. Thus, the 85/1.2 allows some images to happen that would not otherwise happen.
The wide aperture also creates remarkably shallow depth of field with out-of-focus areas that are beautifully blurred. While shallow depth of field is an aspect of almost any telephoto lens, the 85/1.2 takes shallow depth of field to an extreme. This makes it a great tool for isolating the subject from the background, drawing the viewer’s attention instantly to the subject, while giving just a hint of the background to establish a context. When a background might otherwise be busy and distracting, the 85/1.2 comes in to make it smooth and pretty. The out-of-focus areas can be described as painterly, or even unreal.
This is the opposite of the look produced by today’s point-and-shoot digital cameras, which offer extreme depth of field. At the same time, this old design goes well with Canon’s digital SLR’s. For example, with the 1.6X cropping factor of Canon’s EOS 10D camera, the 85/1.2 has the field of view of an unbelievable 135 mm f1.2 lens – a lens that, as far as I know, has never been available for the 35 mm film format. The 85/1.2 can also produce marvelous results when coupled with a flash. Adding flash allows for even slower shutter speeds, allowing one to shoot in even lower light, simultaneously freezing the action and capturing some of the ambiance of the available light.
While the lens has its wonderful qualities, it has to be used with some thought to its limitations. Shooting in low light with a slow-focusing lens at a wide aperture means that there is a relatively high risk that the subject will be out of focus, especially if the subject is moving. It helps to focus carefully (placing the active auto-focus point on an area with some detail), to overshoot anything important, and to refocus frequently. Also, contrast can be noticeably lower at f1.2 than at f2.0 or smaller (easily fixed in Photoshop), and the lens has a prominent flare pattern when pointed toward a light source (not easily fixed). Finally, the effect of this lens on a full-frame camera can be nearly reproduced at much lower cost by using a 50 mm f1.4 on a DSLR with a 1.6X crop factor.
Today’s mid-range zooms are far more practical for most wedding coverage, so the 85/1.2 is unlikely to be one’s main wedding lens. When weddings occur in brightly lit interiors or outdoors, there’s probably little need for an 85/1.2. But for extremely shallow depth of field and for dark interiors where flash is prohibited or intrusive, this lens can be an excellent tool.
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