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Canon FD lenses - a chart with details and pics


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I've been shooting stills with Canon FD glass since I was a teenager (hint: a VERY long time!)  and I've always wanted to shoot motion pictures through those lenses I've spent so much of my life peering through.  I thought the time had finally come, about 15 years ago, with the Redrock Micro spinning-glass doohickey.  So I bought one, and a Panasonic HVX-200, and got to work testing things out.  I probably don't need to tell *you* folks what a piece of utter crap that turned out to be!  The list of issues was long, and Redrock had no interest in addressing them.   I did a lot of testing of everything to figure out what worked and what didn't (I even did a stint as second camera operator in a local indie film!) but I eventually sold the whole rig in disgust.

With the advent of full-frame mirrorless DSLRs, it is now finally possible to use that glass to shoot movies!  I have a Nikon Z6 and am quite happy with it.  It occurs to me therefore, that there might once again be some interest in a massive web page I put together back in those days, with pictures of and through pretty much every interesting Canon FD lens they made.

http://backglass.org/duncan/redrock/lenscharts/canon_fd/

I had planned to shoot dollied shots through each of the prime lenses, pulling in on a fixed object, but that never came to pass before I gave up on the thing.  Thus all the broken links in the "Fixed Object" column.

The concept was that I set up on the 50 yard line of the local high school football field, and shot straight down the field towards the school.  Every shot was taken from the exact same position, so you can compare fields of view, etc.  I also shot stills there, to compare the field of view that the Redrock rig got vs the field of view normally seen through that lens.  Since I am a huge wide angle fan, the hope was that the horizontal field of view would be the same, just narrowed down top and bottom to the aspect ratio of the HVX.

Duncan

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Another little fun/annoying diversion that Redrock sent me down was proving them wrong when they said that the horrific vignetting I was getting with their adapter was due to the coverage of the lens.  Seriously?  I've been using this thing on a still camera for decades and never saw vignetting but you're telling me they cut it so close I see it on your adapter?  "Just zoom in more!" they say - but then why am I using a wide lens, if I'm killing half my field of view?  (I knew I shouldn't have revisited this fiasco...grrrrr)

ANYWAY, to show them how full of it they were, I came up with a way to show the actual image circle of a Canon FD lens.  I cobbled together a recessed lens mount for my 4x5 camera, which would allow me to put the lens at the right FFD from the much larger film... which would then capture everything coming through the lens.  Then in PhotoShop I could draw a 24x36mm rectangle on that image, to compare it to the image circle.

The rig:

horseman_45_front.thumb.jpg.98ba417696f823c04c6c4172017c8259.jpg

horseman_45_back.jpg

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