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p.4 #20 · p.4 #20 · Canon 85mm f1.4 IS L First Images. Show us your Images. | |
I haven't used mine a lot, yet, but have shot some corporate environmental portraits with it in a modern glass-walled type office building using available light and a lot of shooting against the windows with strong backlighting. This is one area where I felt the 85/1.2 wasn't great with a fair amount of veiling flare. The 85/1.4L handled these situations much better, to the point where I didn't even think about it and just shot. While there was some lowering of contrast where a very bright area was against someone's body, the way the light kind of wrapped around and slightly bled along edges looked quite natural. I was also pleased not to find much in the way of LOCA fringing, and when there was, in a few shots, it was pretty easy to fix in post. Fringing was definitely a problem with the old 85 and in strong backlighting, AF could be unreliable. The new lens is much more consistent. I did have to dial in some MFA, but it seems to be more the camera because I have to do it with pretty much all my lenses on that body.
Hard to describe the bokeh differences, but I would say the new 85 is more Guassian and has a fairly clean, unsurprising look to the background, which is good and bad. It's good because so far it's safe and predictable. Bad because it's kind of boring. But it's a tradeoff I'll take for the faster, more consistent AF, IS, better backlight performance, etc.
I've been shooting it mostly at f/2 just to get a touch more depth of field, sharpness and background information. It's definitely sharp enough. Maybe the ART and Otus are sharper, but for people photos, I can't complain.
Looking forward to see what Canon does with the 135. A 105/1.8 would also be cool. I've tried the Nikon 105/1.4 and it's amazing, but I could give up half a stop for some size and weight reduction for 90% of the goodness of that lens.
But I still want a 70-135/2L IS... !!
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