85mm F1.2L II - Not happy

I have recently purchased a Canon 1D mark 4 and an 85mm F1.2L II.

I have been getting so many out of foucus images with the 85mm it's not funny. Some times I get it bang on it's great, but a lot of time they are soft and oof.

With flash it helps a lot and you get nice crisp sharp shots.Taken with available light indoors and results are mainly displeasing. I've taken lots of shots at various ISO's and am not happy....

Anyone had similar experiences with this lens and is it a learning curve.

I have a 70-200 F2.8 and it's bang on much more consistently !

It's clear that it's not lens but the technique. Are you having trouble at 1.2 or e.g. 2.8?

You're probably just missing the focus, which isn't hard with the extremely thin dof at f/1.2.

Either that or camera shake.

What aperture are you using?

I took shots at various apertures hand held on the 1d4 at F1.2 up to F5.6 and various with flash. Ones with flash were in the main bang on and super sharp. However the hand held ones in natural light with ISO up to 800...I was not happy. Now I get much more reliable shots from the 70-200 and yea that is IS.

I've taken loads with the 85 and I'm just getting mixed results. Great on a nice sunny day, but I will be wanting to use this for weddings, so need it to be great indoors with no flash, which is why I got it.

If you let me borrow it, I can test it out for you.

Here are some test shots;

No Flash and at F1.2

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You didn't mention what shutter speed you were using. I use a 1dmkIII with the 85L and love it, but there is a learning curve. Keep in mind that on the 1.3 crop, it's actually more like a 110mm with no IS, so hand holding anything below 1/100 of a second will be rough,(at least for me it is). The fact that your flash pics are sharp suggest that it is a shutter speed issue, as regardless of the camera shutter speed, the flash duration is maybe 1/800 of a second or less.

Have fun playing with it, you'll wind up loving it.

Ed

First of all, you got one of the greatest combination if not the best. What kind of focus method you used? Is it possible that the focus point chosen by the camera was different from the one you were looking at? Try to use manual center point focus to make more test shots. If it is still oof a lot, try to use the micro adjustment on the camera. If it still doesn't work, send it back to Canon. I bet you will be thrilled after they fix the problem.

daft_togger wrote in post #10303603
I took shots at various apertures hand held on the 1d4 at F1.2 up to F5.6 and various with flash. Ones with flash were in the main bang on and super sharp. However the hand held ones in natural light with ISO up to 800...I was not happy. Now I get much more reliable shots from the 70-200 and yea that is IS.

I've taken loads with the 85 and I'm just getting mixed results. Great on a nice sunny day, but I will be wanting to use this for weddings, so need it to be great indoors with no flash, which is why I got it.

Definitely user error. This lens is brutal when shooting at 1.2

madddman wrote in post #10303685
You didn't mention what shutter speed you were using. I use a 1dmkIII with the 85L and love it, but there is a learning curve. Keep in mind that on the 1.3 crop, it's actually more like a 110mm with no IS, so hand holding anything below 1/100 of a second will be rough,(at least for me it is). The fact that your flash pics are sharp suggest that it is a shutter speed issue, as regardless of the camera shutter speed, the flash duration is maybe 1/800 of a second or less.

Have fun playing with it, you'll wind up loving it.

Ed

I hope so as it's a very expensive lens !!

Todd Lambert wrote in post #10303694
Definitely user error. This lens is brutal when shooting at 1.2

Well it may be no good to me then. I has purchased the lens to use as a portrait lens to use in low light at weddings etc....and if it's unreliable at F1.2 then I cannot run the risk....I'd sooner use my 70-200mm F2.8 which is a cracking lens

No exif on those test shots. Can you re-post with exif?

This is one taken in a well lit conservatory - 1D4 and 85mm at ISO400 and F1.8.....nothing wrong with this one

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daft_togger wrote in post #10303706
Well it may be no good to me then. I has purchased the lens to use as a portrait lens to use in low light at weddings etc....and if it's unreliable at F1.2 then I cannot run the risk....I'd sooner use my 70-200mm F2.8 which is a cracking lens

You could just stop down the 85L to f2.8 and it too would be a cracking lens for you.

Graham