I’ve complained before that 28mm is probably the most boring focal length in photography. It’s the optical equivalent of plain toast: perfectly serviceable but rarely exciting. It sits somewhere between the intimacy of a 35mm and the drama of something genuinely wide, making it feel suspiciously similar to the field of view on your phone. If nothing else, it’s useful for photographing your lunch.

Despite my lack of enthusiasm, there was one obvious gap in my rangefinder kit. Finding a good 28mm lens for the Leica Thread Mount isn’t exactly easy because wide-angle lens design in the 1950s involved plenty of optical compromises. The obvious budget option is the Soviet Orion-15, but its relatively slow f/5.6 aperture and steadily rising second-hand prices meant it wasn’t quite what I was looking for. At the other end of the spectrum sat Leica’s own Elmarit, but buying one of those would probably have required selling one of my children, and they’re now old enough to understand employment law.

Instead, while wandering around Shinjuku in search of something completely different, I stumbled across the Canon 28mm f/2.8. It struck a happy compromise between affordability and quality, and although it lacks the red dot that causes photographers to lose all sense of financial responsibility, it still feels wonderfully substantial. Built from brass and glass, it’s compact, beautifully made and just heavy enough to remind you that cameras used to be engineered rather than assembled.

Its pedigree isn’t exactly shabby either. This was one of the lenses favoured by Garry Winogrand as he documented post-war America, producing one of the most influential bodies of street photography ever assembled. Winogrand died at just fifty-six, leaving behind thousands of undeveloped rolls of film. I’ve somehow managed to outlive him already, although my own contribution to photographic history currently consists of a steadily growing archive of YouTube videos that algorithmically disappear into the digital abyss.

Still, one or two people are watching, so I thought it was finally time to give this little Canon the outing it deserved.

A Vintage Lens in Shenzhen and Vienna

Like many of my photography trips, this one began with work rather than art. An overnight business trip to Shenzhen left just enough time for an hour wandering through Happy Valley, which, despite its cheerful name, possessed the slightly unsettling atmosphere of an abandoned theme park. It felt strangely appropriate to photograph it on black-and-white Kentmere 100 using my Leica M2, allowing the stark architecture and empty spaces to become the real subject rather than the colours themselves.

The Canon immediately makes a good first impression. It’s tiny enough to disappear onto the front of the Leica, yet the focus ring remains easy to grip. It features Canon’s familiar infinity lock, which has a reputation for annoying photographers but quickly becomes second nature once you’ve spent some time with it. Likewise, the front-mounted aperture ring works surprisingly well because the clicks are lighter than the focus action, allowing exposure adjustments without accidentally throwing focus out.

Internally, though, this is unmistakably a product of the 1950s. The six-element design lacks the sophisticated corrections of modern optics, and nobody is going to mistake it for a clinically perfect contemporary lens. Instead, it embraces the sort of imperfections that vintage lens enthusiasts spend their lives romanticising. This lens wasn’t designed to chase laboratory sharpness charts; it was designed to make photographs.

Its age also makes it feel perfectly at home on film. Introduced in 1957, it predates many of the modern photographic conventions we now take for granted, and pairing it with a mechanical Leica feels entirely natural. Ironically, my first experiences with it weren’t on the Leica at all but on my Canon P, until that camera developed a dragging shutter caused by loose stitching on the shutter curtain. The repair proved rather more delicate than these sausage fingers were prepared to attempt, and the whole episode ultimately nudged me towards buying the Leica M2 instead.

One pleasant surprise is how well the M2 accommodates the lens despite lacking dedicated 28mm framelines. By simply using almost the entire viewfinder, the framing becomes remarkably accurate, even if it occasionally requires removing my glasses and pressing my face uncomfortably close to the camera.

Of course, adapting the lens to a modern mirrorless body removes all of those compromises. Mounted on my Nikon Z6 with a simple adapter during a walk through Vienna’s Museum Quarter and Naschmarkt, the Canon suddenly had focus peaking, magnification and a high-resolution sensor revealing every one of its strengths and weaknesses in glorious detail.

Character Over Perfection

If you’re looking for objective perfection, this isn’t the lens for you. In fact, judged purely by modern standards, it’s difficult to argue that it’s particularly good at all.

Let’s begin with the flare. Despite the deeply recessed front element, point this lens anywhere near the sun and it erupts into a psychedelic display of hexagonal ghosts, coloured blobs, veiling flare and collapsing contrast. Some photographers deliberately seek out that behaviour, but I generally prefer keeping the sun somewhere over my shoulder, so most of my examples avoid the full disco light show.

More problematic is the vignetting. Wide open at f/2.8, the corners darken dramatically, as though the world is being viewed through a cardboard tube while driving through an alpine tunnel. Even stopping down doesn’t entirely eliminate it, and if you’re allergic to heavy corner shading, this lens probably isn’t going to become your new favourite.

Sharpness is equally complicated. At maximum aperture, the centre remains respectable, but detail falls away rapidly towards the edges where the image becomes noticeably smeared. Yet somehow, those flaws work together to produce something unexpectedly appealing. The rendering has a painterly quality that modern lenses often sacrifice in pursuit of perfection, and photographs seem to possess a depth and atmosphere that’s difficult to quantify on a test chart.

Stopping the lens down transforms its behaviour. By f/16 the dreamy softness gives way to surprisingly rich detail, while still retaining the gentle microcontrast and subtle rendering that make older optics so enjoyable to use. Tree bark gains texture, colours become vibrant and every corner of the frame rewards closer inspection, even if absolute edge sharpness never quite catches up with contemporary designs.

Looking back through photographs from both Shenzhen and Vienna, the Canon feels remarkably consistent despite the very different subjects. The quiet, almost surreal emptiness of Happy Valley contrasts beautifully with the bustle of Vienna’s flea markets, yet the lens gives both places a cohesive visual identity. Digital files from the Nikon certainly reveal more of the lens’s colour shifts and optical fall-off than film ever does, but they also confirm that the central sharpness is more than adequate while the imperfections remain part of its charm rather than distractions.

Ultimately, that’s what makes the Canon 28mm f/2.8 such an enjoyable lens. It doesn’t pretend to be perfect, nor does it try to compete with modern optics on technical grounds. Instead, it delivers photographs with personality, accepting softness, flare and vignetting as part of the creative process rather than problems to eliminate. Wide open it behaves like an unruly opera singer, full of excess and theatrical flourish. Stop it down and it settles into something far more disciplined, pairing beautifully with the Leica M2 to produce images that feel timeless rather than merely old.

Sometimes character really is worth more than perfection, and this little Canon has plenty of both flaws and personality to keep earning a place in my camera bag.