The Canon FD 50mm F1.4

November ‘26

I bought my Canon FD 50mm f/1.4 in Stockholm, at Bruno's Bildverkstad, which is the kind of thing you can say at dinner parties to sound much more cosmopolitan than you are. The truth is that I went in for a lens cap and came out lighter by a sum I've since agreed with myself never to say aloud. The lens itself is a small, dense, faintly smug object from an era when Canon assumed you'd be using it for the rest of your life and built on that basis. It has a breech-lock mount, which sounds like something you'd use to hold a cannon to a frigate and works on roughly the same principle. It's made of real metal and real glass, and you can tell, because it weighs about the same as a tin of beans and dents furniture when dropped, as I have established through careful and entirely unintentional research. It's the sort of lens that was once so common people gave them away with cameras, the way petrol stations used to give away glassware. Now they sit in Scandinavian shop windows like minor relics, and people like me press our noses against the glass and make small whimpering noises.

What it's really for, though, I've come to believe, is London in the middle of autumn. Around four o'clock the sun sinks low and gives up any pretence of warmth, and everything turns the colour of weak tea and old brass. At f/1.4 the lens has a lovely way of not quite caring about the edges of things. Brick goes soft, a bus becomes a red smear of good intentions, and a man waiting at a crossing in Holborn suddenly looks like a minor character in a novel you half remember loving. Modern lenses are sharp corner to corner, which I'm told is a virtue. I can't help feeling it's a bit like someone at a party who tells you everything about themselves in the first four minutes. The old Canon holds things back. It glows a little wide open and flares at the slightest provocation, and on a damp November afternoon it makes Fleet Street look as if it has just remembered something wistful. I've taken perhaps three genuinely good photographs with it. That's three more than I deserve, and on balance I'd say it was worth every krona I'm not telling you about