Remember the beautiful weird lens paradise that Mathieu Stern recently visited? During this visit to Camera Rescue in Tampere, Finland, he got to test out some pretty rare, weird and unique lenses. And one of them is Canon 50mm f/0.95 from the 1960s. Mathieu tested out how it works for portraits, and although fun, shooting with this lens looks a bit challenging, too.
“Produced in the 1960s, it was more of a technical demonstration and a marketing gimmick than anything else,” Mathieu writes. Hmmm, that sounds familiar. Anyways, only 25,000 units were produced, so the Canon dream lens is rare-ish nowadays. But you can still find them on eBay for $2,500 and up.
Mathieu mounted the lens onto his Sony a7 III and took it for a spin around some beautiful locations. Of course, most of us probably find it most interesting to see how this lens performs when it’s wide open at f/0.95. As you can probably assume, you can forget about having everything in focus if you have more than one subject (for example, photographing a model next to a car, like in the video).
Focusing manually at f/0.95 is only for manual focus masters. Honestly, I get a slight anxiety attack only when I think about nailing focus manually at this aperture.
Still, Mathieu got some pretty cool shots with this challenging, imperfect, but still fun lens. You can see the photos he took in the video, and check out a few of them below. Also, if you’d like to see more photos taken with a Canon Dream Lens on a Sony camera, head over to this article.
[Shooting Portraits at F0.95 with the DREAM LENS | Mathieu Stern]
FIND THIS INTERESTING? SHARE IT WITH YOUR FRIENDS!