Sean's Canon FD Lens Collection

Canon FD lenses were manufactured from the early 1970s right up to the mid 90's. In that time, Canon manufactured 134 variant lenses with the FD mount, and countless FD lenses were also manufactured by third party companies. Because of this, Canon FD lenses are easy to find on the used camera market and are often fairly inexpensive, making them a great choice for adapting to your digital camera. If you're looking for a manual focus vintage lens with a softer, more filmic look, consider adapting Canon FD.

I got my first Canon FD lens from my father, who gave me his Canon AE-1 film SLR camera and the Canon FD 50mm f1.8 lens he used with it. When I realized I could adapt this lens to my Sony A7S II with a Fotodiox Canon FD to Sony E adapter, I never looked back, shooting phtoso and videos almost entirely with my ever growing collection of Canon FD lenses.

The Canon FD 50mm f1.8 I inherited from my father is a superb lens for capturing beautiful shallow focus bokeh images. It's also great for video. I've shot multiple short films with it.

The next Canon FD lens I added to my collection was the Canon FD 28mm f2.8, my favorite all-purpose lens. It's great for close focus portraits and photos of flowers and bugs, especially when I add a Fotodiox macro tube, but it's also a superb wide angle lens for hand-held video and landscape photography. It's probably the lens I use the most in my collection.

Everyone needs a zoom lens and my Canon FD 70-210mm f4 fits the bill. I use this lens less frequently than the others, but when I need a zoomed in photo or video, or even some nice macro photos with its included macro mode, it does a superb job.

The Canon FD 7.5mm f5.6 fisheye lens is the most expensive lens in my FD collection. I purchased it for around $300, though the price has now gone up considerably. It's a really fun lens to shoot with, and is the nicest fisheye lens I own.

The Canon FD 35-70mm f3.5-4.5 is the newest addition to my collection. It's a fairly cheap plastic kit lens and the variable aperture when zooming in is a bit annoying. I've only used it a few times, but I do enjoy the fact that it's a zoom that's lighter and more portable than most. It's particularly fun to add tilt effects to it with a Fotodiox Canon FD to Sony E TLT ROKR adapter.

I also own a few non-Canon brand FD lenses that I enjoy adapting. You can call these honorable mentions.

The Vivitar 28mm f2.8 is super soft and has unique bokeh swirl and lens flare. I like using it when I want a softer, more lofi look for videos or photos.

The Vivitar 20mm f3.8 is a useful wide angle lens. I'm not a fan of its color fringing and softer focus, but it's always useful for wide angle photos and videos, especially when I want to create a distorted, dreamy look.

These are all of the Canon FD lenses I currently own and adapt to my Sony camera, as well as other cameras, with various Fotodiox lens adapters. Because of how affordable these lenses are, I'm sure it's only a matter of time before I add more vintage Canon FD lenses to my collection.