A new old lens

Those who have followed this blog will recall that sometimes I like using old lenses on newer cameras, but this is kind of extreme even for me. With some help from a colleague who made some adaptations to a camera lens board and a camera mount, I was able to mount a 1950s 250mm Rodenstock Imagon onto a Sinar view camera, and then mount my Canon 5D onto the camera. Cool, eh? I know, all of you are dying to try this at home. With a machinist and about $3,500, you can have the same set up.

The lens is classic design but its main attribute is that it is a soft-focus lens. In the early 1900s, before the Ansel Adams generation came into vogue, there was a movement or genre of photography called pictorialism. These photos were characterized by being in focus, but also being soft. I know, a bit confusing. Pictorial photos were both in focus but they looked soft. It wasn't the photographer, but the lenses that they used. These lenses were just very poorly corrected compared to today's lenses, and then on top of that, they were often more diffused by the photographer, who put things like disks with different size holes in front of the lens elements--the great thing about them is that the level of softness is adjustable. They were used for landscapes, but they were more often used for portraits. What a great idea! There are no dramatic wrinkles with a soft focus portrait lens, and women, and honestly men, too, loved theses lenses for that reason. These old lenses are now in high demand, and some of them cost thousands of dollars.

I found and bought one of these are few years ago, but haven't used it--film is too hard to use. The adaptations that my friend helped with allows me to use it. Certainly these photos don't touch all the potential of the lens, but I am learning with the lens. The photos are in order, and show the lens without a disk, the lens stopped down, and then with some of the disks and the different affects. The street scene is the lens at its in-focus softest.