 Canon makes more lenses dedicated to special purposes than any other SLR manufacturer. Along with the incredible selection of zooms, wide-angle and telephoto lenses, there are a host of unique lenses in the EOS system, many of which can't be found anywhere else in photography.
For portraits, landscapes and other images with a difference, consider the EF 135mm f/2.8 Softfocus lens. This softfocus lens gives photographers looking for a fast, moderate-telephoto lens the best of both worlds. It's a tack-sharp 135mm lens with the softfocus disabled, but with the turn of a ring on the lens, you can dial-in two degrees of deliberate spherical aberration to provide a beautiful soft effect. Furthermore, you can vary the effect by your choice of aperture; the softfocus is effective, adjustable and repeatable from f/2.8 to f/5.6. Like most EF telephoto lenses, it will stop down to f/32 when you need depth-of-field.
One of the most popular special-purpose lenses is the EF 15mm f/2.8 Fisheye lens. This full-frame fisheye lens, which can be used with any EOS film or digital SLR, produces ultra-wide images with pronounced barrel distortion, giving a diagonal 180º angle of view. Holding the camera vertically and pointing it straight ahead, you'll probably have your feet in the picture! Even more impressive to some professionals is the EF 14mm f/2.8L lens. Despite only 1mm of difference compared to the 15mm fisheye lens, the 14mm f/2.8L is a fully corrected rectilinear wide-angle lens that is not only excellent for architecture and similar applications requiring ultra-wide coverage, but it's in great demand by commercial photographers who value the unusual perspective and different "look" it can give to an ordinary scene. And, on a digital SLR like the EOS D60, it provides the equivalent of about a 22mm lens, allowing extra-wide coverage that's difficult to get with current digital SLRs.
The Canon Tilt-Shift lens series opens the door to many new possibilities. Actually a series of three lenses -- a 24mm, a standard 45mm, and a portrait-length 90mm telephoto -- the TS-E lenses work on any EOS SLR body (film or digital) and allow shifting the image to keep straight lines straight in a picture or to alter composition without moving the camera, and tilting of the front of the lens to alter the plane of what's sharp in the picture. It's like having a view camera, with the portability and convenience of a modern SLR.
Two other unique lenses that provide their own signature look to a picture are the high-speed professional EF 50mm f/1.0L and 85mm f/1.2L. Both can give a very natural perspective combined with a very out-of-focus background, concentrating the viewer's attention on a subject, when you shoot at normal distances with either lens at wide-open apertures. And of course, they're unequalled for available-light applications such as theater photography.
Sometimes, though, the best special-effects are what you do inside your camera. From zooming your lens during a long exposure to using tungsten-based film in daylight to intentionally get an overly blue color balance in your pictures, there are almost no limits to what you can do to stretch the creative boundaries. When the optical effect of a lens is what you need to give your photography a boost, EOS owners have known for years that Canon probably has an EF lens to do just that.
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