A Woman I Met in Lacock Abbey Cloisters

Carl Zeiss Jena Tessar 50mm f/2.8 lens on a Canon EOS 40D digital camera. The chief reason I bought into the Canon EOS system was to use this lens. Fortunately the low cost of secondhand discontinued digital SLR cameras enables such indulgences.

The design of the Carl Zeiss Jena 50mm F2.8 Tessar stretches back at least to the 1930's where countless examples exist in different forms, formats, and mounts. This is a fundamentally simple lens of just four elements in three groups with five aperture blades.

It is not the best 50mm lens that I own. However, it is certainly the cheapest. So it is something of a mystery why I find it so satisfying to use. It is slow for a 50mm lens at f/2.8. The focus throw is very wide, allowing precision at the expense of fast handling. It seems sharp, but nearly all 50mm lenses are sharp. It performs well wide open; so do many others. Colour rendition is good. Distortion is not a problem. Contrast is strong. You could say the same about practically all 50mm lenses. But I like this particular lens very much.