Canon FD 85mm f/1.2 L on the Sony A7R

I'm still "decompressing" following my adventures in Brazil. I've spent quite a lot of time sorting through my images and trying to get them into some kind of order, and ensuring they are all backed up. I still haven't formatted my memory cards "just in case" but I've got everything imported and backed up so I think all is OK.Whilst I was backing up to a separate hard drive while in Brazil, one lesson I've learned is to ensure that I do this a bit more rigorously. I was using the excellent Lightroom export catalog function so that my backups would include all the metadata and image edits from my laptop, as well as the images themselves, but it turns out that I often missed images that I hadn't included in particular Lightroom catalogs on my laptop. This meant doing a cleanup and also chasing down images that were lurking on memory cards unimported as they hadn't been selected in camera during a game for example. I'll do a more comprehensive lessons learned writeup shortly.Anyhow, what better than to try out some new kit. Before I left for Brazil I bought a brand new (yes, brand new!!) Canon FD 85mm f/1.2L lens for my Sony A7R and I didn't really get the chance to use it before I left. Brand new, as it was found boxed and packed in the back of a store room and then shipped off to Richard Caplan in London for sale, and I couldn't resist. This is the FD not EF lens, so manual focus. What a lovely thing it is. One of the great things about the A7R is the ability to slot so many different lenses onto it.I'm a bit of a sucker for very wide aperture lenses, having picked up a Canon FD 50 1.2 a little while back as well. The 85mm is a hefty beast with some major chunks of glass in it, but really well made, solid and everything is lovely and smooth. With the aperture fully open it's a sight to behold.To fit it onto the Sony A7R, an adapter is required that goes from the Canon FD fit to the Sony E-mount. Also, the adapter needs an inbuilt ring that enables the lens aperture to work properly. I'm sure others can explain this better than me, but the aperture ring on the lens doesn't do anything unless specific levers on the camera-end of the lens are correctly positioned. The adapter should do this for you. The Pixco adapter that I bought from eBay for a few £s has a ring around it that says "Lock" and "Open". When in the Lock position the aperture ring on the lens adjusts the aperture as you would expect. When in the Open position the lens is at fully open aperture. Make sure you get an adapter with this facility otherwise you're going to be stuck at f/1.2 (which may be exactly why you bought the lens of course!). So, it's a sizeable, quite heavy lens, manual focus, manual aperture, and needs an adapter to work on the A7R. What's it like to use?Getting the focus right is critical with a lens like this. Being manual focus, you could argue that you have total control over what you focus on, making it potentially more accurate than an autofocus lens. The focus throw is very long at over 180 degrees - you need two or three armfuls to go from one end of the range to the other - a lot different to Leica M lenses for example. But this gives you a large degree of very fine control which is desirable when the depth of field is about 5mm on a headshot portrait at f/1.2.My technique is to use the little button inside the AF/MF selector as the focus magnifier, and zoom in to obtain precise focus before pressing the button. Focus peaking is nowhere near precise enough for this lens at full aperture. Obviously don't let your head or body sway or you'll end up with a blurry mess, so fine are the depth of field tolerances.With focus achieved, the images from this lens are beautifully sharp at f/1.2. I spent a day shooting with it at the weekend and basically just left it at f/1.2 and got on with it. The A7R's shutter going up to 1/8000th meant that no neutral density filter was needed in sunlight thankfully. With it being quite tricky nailing the focus, don't think of trying to take pictures of anything that moves! Of course you can always drop the aperture down to get a bit more latitude but then you wouldn't be needing an f/1.2 lens would you?As you can see above, pointing it pretty much straight into the sun causes some interesting flare. As you'd expect, the out of focus areas are lovely and smooth, and there's some circular patterning going on which I like a lot. There is some easily fixed colour fringing on highlighted edges which Lightroom sorts out in a jiffy.As a portrait lens you can get that manically shallow depth of field effect (which I know some people hate but I like). Also you can get some very unique looks when shooting from further away with excellent subject isolation. Here are a couple of portrait examples, showing the lovely focus fall-off. OK it's nothing like Gordon's large format wet plate Petzval lens stuff (more on that in another post) but can result in some really lovely images.I do really like this lens. Along with the Canon FD 50 1.2 and my Canon EF 24 1.4, I've got 3 very high quality very wide aperture lenses that work very well on the A7R. The only real problem with them is that they are quite large and heavy, which sort of goes against the grain of what the A7R is all about - lightweight and portable. They are speciality lenses rather than something you'd keep on the camera every day, but brilliant to have for those special pictures where nothing else will do.