A bit of Whimsy

No hidden social agendas. No deep meaning. Just me playing with a new (old, very old) lens. More are here. OK, the story of how I came to own the cars is sort of neat.

Pinkham & Smith Semi Achromatic ?????

Jim,

Please enlighten me. What was the purpose of these type of lenses? Both you and Asher are in love with this old glass. However to me, there is nothing special and the soft focus is, how does one say boring. They have no commercial value (commercial photography, product, etc.). They in themselves have value to you, Asher and others.

I'm at a total loss to see their value. What were they originally designed for and are there any examples from the 1800's of photo taken with them.

Thanks

Bill Miller said:

Jim,

Please enlighten me. What was the purpose of these type of lenses? Both you and Asher are in love with this old glass. However to me, there is nothing special and the soft focus is, how does one say boring. They have no commercial value (commercial photography, product, etc.). They in themselves have value to you, Asher and others.

I'm at a total loss to see their value. What were they originally designed for and are there any examples from the 1800's of photo taken with them.

Thanks

Click to expand...

Bill,

What can I say? It's something like fine wines. They're especially is appreciated by those who seek them. In a practical sense, however, they are not really needed. Others can pick up the same dose of alcohol for $1.99 at the supermarket as a special!

These lenses are rather unique and rare. All were made with original design and, at their time revolutionary formulae that have served as the backbone of the current optics you might use. Jim's photograph here is not meant to have any meaning or significance beyond celebrating that lens. For me it's great. However, the audience is limited and so naturally it might be boring and utterly unimportant.

These soft lenses provided not just blur but focus too. Now when some aficionado want to use a 4x5 or larger piece of film, there are few if any modern lenses that can approach this character. Here, classic lenses are usually hand-ground and so each has its own character. They were a solution to the far too sharp lenses that an earlier generation had produced giving pictures too hard a representation of reality. No one wants that!

Asher

Bill,

Let me add that The best of these lenses not only laid down an image with sharp focus but also at wide apertures, brought in more light creating added softness and glow like painted light from an angel’s touch. Some of these lenses treated bright hard light in a wonderful way, making it into a soft glow and not blowing out a section of the film. For the few using large format film for making portraits, the photographer and the client value the look delivered.

So these lenses are not necessary for making a living for most photographers. Far from it. If, however one really wants to work with LF film, these lenses are worthy of consideration.

Of course, one can use a Canon or Nikon 50 1.8 and a $600-$2500 DSLR be done with it.

Asher

Asher,

You have not answered the question. What purpose were they designed for. I'd have to disagree they are like fine wine. It seems they go to the extreme in out of focus. They go beyond softness to just plain out of focus.

There DOF of Field is very shallow. Why would a LF photographer want that degree of softness. You state "For the few using large format film for making portraits, the photographer and the client value the look delivered." Where is an example of that look???

Bill, There is much info on the web about pictorial photography. At the baseline the answer is that in the 1910's and earlier there were always people who thought photography could be artistic. The ideal then and now was as simple as trying to make something beautiful.

A quick history lesson. For the first 25 years lens technology was so limited that no one got a sharp picture without some difficulty. Things progressed and in the mid 1860's new glasses and new designs got lenses with at least an f8 aperture that were super sharp in the middle and you could make a sharp plate if you used a long focal length for your format. By 1895 the anastigmats had arrived and you could make sharp pictures corner to corner. Billions of them. Kodak had introduced cameras for the masses and by 1910 photography had gone in a direction just the opposite of where the groups that thought it could ever be an art form thought it should go.

People like F. Holland Day and Alvin Langdon Coburn sought a lens that would synthesize the picture but not make a clinically sharp picture like all the masses were making. Dallmeyer in England, Puyo in France, and Pinkham & Smith in the United States began to make lenses with purpose built non corrections that would define a photograph but not make one that was so sharp that it didn't leave room for the mind to play with. Of course there has always been a place in portraiture both then and now for a lens that gives the sitter some help. An invention called the Hasselblad had squashed pictorial portraiture even preceeding the digital age. They've all looked alike since 1970. Boring. It wasn't so as late as 1948. Find a copy of Charles Abel's book "Professional Portrait Lightings". All of these antique lenses were still in common use just 60 years ago. No one knew they were rare or special in some of our lifetimes.

Do some searches for; photo secessionists, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Alfred Steiglitz, Julia Margaret Cameron, Gertrude Kasebier, Clarence White if you're actually interested. Try to remember that just because it has no value for you doesn't mean there is no value. I don't go to operas but my vote counts very little towards the whole. The argument can certainly be made that modern digital photography has gotten awfully clinical, awfully low. Whoopee another oversaturated sharp picture that the operator had to put little or no effort into. Pay $400 bucks, aim it, push the button. Impressive.

Thanks Jim