Shooting directly into a light source is the fastest way to ruin a technically correct photograph and the slowest way to make a memorable one. The RF 50mm f/1.2L USM handles the contradiction better than it has any right to. The technique is contre-jour — French for “against the day,” meaning your subject is between you and the primary light source. The light halos the subject, separates them from the background, and collapses foreground detail into silhouette or near-silhouette.

Dual Pixel RAW is a Canon capture mode that records each pixel’s left and right photodiode data separately, storing approximately twice the file size of a standard RAW. The primary advertised use — bokeh shift, ghost reduction — is marginal in most practical situations. The genuinely useful application is microadjustment of the focus point in Canon’s Digital Photo Professional software after capture. At f/1.2 on the RF 50mm, the depth of field is thin enough that a focus acquisition that lands two millimeters in front of the intended plane produces a noticeably soft result.

The RF 50mm f/1.2L USM vignettes at f/1.2. This is not a defect to correct in post. Left uncorrected, it is a compositional tool that draws the eye toward the center of the frame and applies a graduated darkening to the corners. Canon’s in-camera lens correction and Lightroom’s lens profile will eliminate this automatically if you let them. You should consider not letting them. Optical vignetting at the maximum aperture of a large-diameter lens is a physical consequence of the geometry: light arriving at the sensor from the edges at oblique angles is partially blocked by the lens barrel.