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William Mortensen
6-Dec-2005, 11:11
There seems to be considerable demand for soft-focus lenses, but I've seen fairly little work with them published. The only recent work I can think of that has found any critical notice was Linda Connor's work back in the late 70's/early 80's. Can anyone steer me towards fairly contemporary (post-photosecession) books, websites, etc. by photographers that make use of soft-focus lenses? Thanks!

Ted Harris
6-Dec-2005, 11:14
Mark, did you see my article "Modern Soft Focus Lenses" in the current issue of View Camera magazine?

Feel free to contact me offlist for any additional information/questions/etc.

Jay DeFehr
6-Dec-2005, 13:13
Hi Mark.

I'm not sure we can correlate demand for any equipment to the publication or critical notice of any work. I think it's a mistake to overlook the effect that collectors have on demand, in favor of users, and very few users are published or critically reviewed. I own and use soft focus lenses, but don't have a website, let alone a book published. You might get a better response if you simply asked the contributors to this forum to post examples of SF work. That being said, I know of at least one website featuring SF work. Jim Galli has some SF work posted here:

http://tonopahpictures.0catch.com/

In my experience, SF lenses are more demanding of patient experimentation than their tack-sharp counterparts. The technical challenges associated with SF work are much different than those associated with sharp work, and can seem foriegn and confusing to the uninitiated. I suspect many novices give up in frustration before glimpsing the potential of the technique.

I think that a large part of the appeal of SF lenses is the mystique associated with them. Every lens seems to have its own personality, and to require unique handling to extract the qualities so lovingly ascribed to them by their accolytes, and the exotic beauty of the best Sf work.

Jay

Brian Ellis
6-Dec-2005, 13:56
"Can anyone steer me towards fairly contemporary (post-photosecession) books, websites, etc. by photographers that make use of soft-focus lenses? "

Sally Mann's recent book about the South, sorry I can't remember the title, was done with very old, sometimes defective, lenses, not necessarily "soft focus" lenses as such but the images I've seen from the book had a soft focus effect because of the lenses used.

Struan Gray
6-Dec-2005, 14:29
I don't know what equipment she uses, but Lynn Geesaman's gardenscapes are an interesting use of soft focus or darkroom blur. Some tend to the sweet and sickly, but the best (to me) have a engaging abstract combination of abstraction and looseness.

http://www.edelmangallery.com/geesaman.htm

http://www.aperture.org/store/books-detail.aspx?ID=255

Philippe Gauthier
6-Dec-2005, 15:24
LF soft focus lenses are financially out of reach for me atthe moment, but I experimented quite a bit with a Sima 100/f2 SF lens and a 35 mm camera this summer. Some pictures work, some other don't and while some "lessons" seem to emerge - SF lenses do better under hard light than under soft light, most of the time - just what aperture and what level of softness to use depending on the subject matter (close up portrait, head to feet portrait, small area landscape, for instance) is still rather mysterious to me, as I can't generalize my experience in some definite formula. The portrait is still hazy, if I dare say...

I'd be glad to hear about how LF and other photographers use their SF lenses to maximum effect.

Armin Seeholzer
6-Dec-2005, 15:33
Hi Mark

You find some examples also on my website under portraits and under nude. Most of them with a dreamagon and under advertising one with a Imagon in 4x5: www.artfoto.ch

David A. Goldfarb
6-Dec-2005, 16:25
Not a classic soft-focus lens, but there's Mark Tucker's plungercam--a Rodenstock loupe attached with a rubber bellows to a Hasselblad. You might think of it as a high end precursor (that's a $200 loupe!) to the Lensbaby. http://www.marktucker.com/plungercam

Philippe Gauthier
6-Dec-2005, 16:31
I know Mark Tucker's fascinating work with the plunger cam, but I wouldn't call it soft focus. Shift focus or selective plane of focus, perhaps, as it's a kind of mix between Diana photography and mad shift/tilts in LF. But it shares very little with soft focus in the classic sense of the phrase.

Jim Galli
6-Dec-2005, 16:45
The Texas Tintypes come to mind. Brooks just did a nice layout on those in Lenswork. I am nearly finished inflating the market buying different soft focus lenses having just picked up a Pinkham & Smith. That said, the task ahead is daunting. These lenses are unlike our normal plasmats where all you need to do is focus stop down and no surprises afterwards. Each one has a personality that at first glance hints that it could continue to surprise for half a lifetime. How does one approach the task at hand with so little time. My goal is to get proficient with every one, but for now I've barely scratched the surface. Being published isn't even a goal. Enjoyment is.

William Mortensen
6-Dec-2005, 20:29
Thank you all for the replies thus far!

Ted- Yes, I read your VC article with interest. In part it sparked this question. That at least four different manufacturers are currently producing high-end SF lenses, some in multiple focal lengths, indicates a fairly solid demand for these expensive and somewhat-difficult-to-use optics. But I've seen or heard about so little of the work being done with them.

Jay- I don't think the demand is that much driven by collectors; note the four current manufacturers mentioned above. I'd love to see any SF work anyone could post or steer me to an a website. I agree the SF lenses take a bit of getting used to. Their individual quirks make for a much longer learning process, and the results are less able to be pre-visualized accurately. Part of the frustration, part of the mystique! And definitely part of the attraction! Oh, and yes, I've been to Jim Galli's website; it's one of the best!

Brian- Yup, I know Sally Mann's "Mother Land" work, but it's more an aesthetic of abused lenses used in a primative way. Somewhat related in their romantic, dreamlike fashion, but I think different from a traditional soft-focus photographs.

Struan- I'm not that familiar with Geesaman's work, but from what I could tell, it' s more of a diffusion effect that a soft focus. A bit overdone for my eyes, too. Aperture likes it, but my tastes and theirs diverged long ago.

Phillipe- I can't stand even thinking about SF lenses on a 35mm camera! SF seems to demand (to me, at least) the tonal smoothness of a contact print even more that traditional "straight" large format photography.

John- I viewed your site, but at least on my monitor, the images you mentioned didn't seem to have a soft focus effect...

David- Geez, it must have been fun for Mark Tucker building and playing with that little toy; quite nice images, too! But I agree with you and Phillipe; it's much more related to the Diana/Holga/Lensbaby imagery. SF is more "gourmet" screwed-up optics.

Jim- Oh, so YOU'RE the one driving up the prices on all the lenses I want! The Texas Tintypes seemed kind of a strange anachronism- sharply focused at the center, but a heavy-handed out-of-focus effect near the edges. That was never, to my knowledge, part of the original tintype aesthetic; more of a blending of two separate aspects of history for effect, rather like seeing a WWII aircraft in a WWI movie.

"Being published isn't even a goal. Enjoyment is." Yes, but what if you enjoy being published?

GREAT website, by the way! I share your love for Velostigmats; I have two and love them dearly. I *might* prefer my 12" f/4.5 Velostigmat to my 12" f/6.8 Dagor. Hopefully, word won't get out, and they'll stay cheap so I can buy a few more!

Everybody else- Forget what I said about Velostigmats. They're horrible lenses. Don't buy them!

Kerik Kouklis
6-Dec-2005, 22:23
I use several vintage SF focus lenses for 14x17 work including Veritos, Vitax, Pinkham-Smith, Eidoscope, etc. Several of the images in this group (http://kerik.com/gumover.htm) were done this way. I also use them for some of my wet plate collodion (http://kerik.com/collodion.htm) work.

I love the results and part of the fun is never quite being sure what you're going to get until you see the final print (or plate).

William Mortensen
6-Dec-2005, 23:17
Kerik- I can understand why you love the results of your lenses. Your platinum/gum prints comprise one of the loveliest, most eloquent portfolios I've seen. I hope to see your original prints in person some day. I'll save the wet collodion work for tomorrow. Thank you!

Antonio Corcuera
7-Dec-2005, 08:33
sugimoto's "the architecture of time" is definitively worth checking out - no special lenses I believe, but very soft and dreamy focus images of architecture icons (guggenheim, corbusier's ville savoye, etc)
cheers,

Jim Galli
7-Dec-2005, 09:41
"The Texas Tintypes seemed kind of a strange anachronism- sharply focused at the center, but a heavy-handed out-of-focus effect near the edges. That was never, to my knowledge, part of the original tintype aesthetic; more of a blending of two separate aspects of history for effect, rather like seeing a WWII aircraft in a WWI movie. "

Hadn't thought of this before, but yes, it becomes tempting to overstate the obvious in 2005 because you're using tools to make those statements on purpose, where in 1865 you were simply trying to make the best photo possible with the available tools. You tended to move your subject farther from the lens in order to have as much as possible in acceptable focus. So now it becomes a personal preference call. I love the look Robb got in the "tintypes" Besides the personality that the Petzval gives, the process only sees blue and gives an exaggerated "ruddiness" especially to males who have more red in their normal coloring. I have a big f5 Bausch & Lomb projection petzval that gives the identical look. The portrait of Yousef Khanfar taken with this giant lens on 8X10 from about 3 feet away is my personal best to date.

http://tonopahpictures.0catch.com/Bokeh/Yousef-.jpg

Yousef

Clive Russ
7-Dec-2005, 17:22
Jonathan Brewer has a fine image with a soft focus lens here. This is probably made at about f/8

http://www.imageandartifact.bz/

I have had a lot of fun with soft focus lenses, and some sharp lenses too. I use both. For example I often use an 85 mm f/1.2 Canon lens, always at full aperture on a full frame digital body. The sharp plane of focus stands out from the rest of the image. The photo of "Bissy" in the bottom link is done this way. This is quite different from the soft look of the Pinkham & Smith lens, or the Cooke PS945. All have their place, and one of my favorite looks is the PS945 at about f/8, like Jonathan's photo above, where the lens is quite sharp but the plane of focus does not "pop" out of the image. I put some photos on my site to show how the image varies with aperture for the PS945.

http://www.cliveruss.com/cooke/cookeps945/compfstps/index.html

There are some other images there too if you poke around under the Cooke PS945 links.

http://www.cliveruss.com/cooke/cookeps945/ckeprtrts/index.html

Sanders McNew
7-Dec-2005, 21:23
Seeing Jim Galli's post, I'll chime in. After trying out a variety of diffused-focusing lenses and being dissatisfied with the results, I was recently given the gift of a Hermagis Portrait Lens, made in Paris in the 1800s. I believe it is a Petzval-design lens, like Jim's lens, but with an iris aperture. It has a curved focal plane and it does not cover 5x7 without vignetting.

The lovely thing about a curved focal plane is that the lens focuses at the center of the image only if you place the focus there. You can focus at points near the film margin -- eyes, for example -- and the image will be sharp there, but will wander in and out of focus elsewhere. This, to my eye, is much more pleasing than an image that is uniformly diffuse, or that is uniformly soft at the margins.

If anyone is interested, here are links to a few recent efforts shot with the Hermagis. In each case the exposure is 1/15 second at f/10:

http://www.mcnew.net/new/slides/0019Wenona104Hermagis.html

http://www.mcnew.net/new/slides/0020Mary109adj.html

http://www.mcnew.net/new/slides/0021Kathleen12.html

http://www.mcnew.net/new/slides/0024Robin105.html

http://www.mcnew.net/new/slides/0034Nerlande101adj.html

All blunt criticisms greatly appreciated.

Best,

Sanders McNew

Jason Greenberg Motamedi
7-Dec-2005, 21:41
From a contemporary vantage point, the Petzval portrait lens may appear to be "soft focus," however in historical perspective it probably should not be lumped together with the soft/diffused focus lenses made in the first half of the 20th century. How many "soft focus" daguerreotype or ambrotype portraits have you seen from the 19th Century? None I would wager, since the entire point of these lenses is that they are both fast and crisp. Indeed, lenses like the Verito or the Pinkham-Smith were created as an alternative to the Petzval Portrait.

Sanders McNew
7-Dec-2005, 22:12
JG, you are absolutely correct. You've added an element to what I was trying to say. I don't want uniform softness in my images. I want the eyes of my subjects to be tack-sharp. I do want other parts of the image to go soft. But I don't want abrupt changes in sharpness, either.

I don't much care for Petzval (or other, for that matter) lenses shot at their maximum aperture. Too much goes blurry too fast. I treat softness like chillies -- a touch is nice, too much ruins the dish. The reason I love the Hermagis lens is its iris -- it lets me stop down to a point where I keep focus, and the curve of the focal plane creates the effect.

I'm not an expert on the history of optics, but I understand the Rapid Rectilinear lenses were developed to flatten out the focal plane issues presented by the Petzval lenses. Certainly, I have shot several RRs and have found them to be disconcertingly sharp and faithful in their renditions.

I have a Verito and a Velostigmat. Both are fine for what they do. The Verito gets pulled out when shooting elderly relatives. Otherwise, they don't get much use on my camera.

Sanders.

William Mortensen
7-Dec-2005, 22:34
JG is right- there does seem some confusion at times between the true soft focus and other visually softening effects like diffused focus, limited depth of field, bokeh, or edge softness from a curved field of focus.

A true soft focus lens focuses different wavelengths at different distances, which allows for a sharp image surrounded by a soft image. The effect can be very pronounced in the highlights as a glowing "halo" around the brighter objects. *That* is what identifies a true soft focus lens. Stopping the lens down eliminates the effect because the increased depth of field causes the areas of sharp focus for the wavelengths to overlap. I don't know of any soft focus Petzvals, rectalinears, rapid rectalinears, etc. (I'm not sure, but I think most are carefully screwed-up anastigmats or plasmats, made by varying the distance between certain elements. Anybody?)

History-wise, soft focus lenses reached their zenith in the Photo-secession/pictorialist days around the turn of the century (1900) and with the imitators who followed through the 1930's. They printed primarily on rough-surfaced pictorialist papers which often had a colored tint to them, and on what we would now call alternative processes, (platinum,carbon prints, gumprints, gravures...) There were no soft-focus daguerreotypes, tintypes, ambrotypes, etc. I don't think there were any soft-focus card prints or albumen prints; at most a very few.

Nonetheless, that's a beautiful portrait, Jim, and it's always a pleasure to see how a crummy old piece of junk lens can shine in the hands of someone who appreciates and understands it!

Jason Greenberg Motamedi
7-Dec-2005, 22:53
I should qualify my statement above by noting that there is a Petzval variant, the Dallmeyer Patent Portrait (which became the Wolly Vitax once Dallmeyer's patent was up) that allows for a diffused focus by adjusting the spacing between the rear elements.

While this was often advertised in the 20th century as a "soft focus" adjustment, I believe its original purpose was to extend or diffuse the focus by the purposeful addition of spherical aberration. In other words, by increasing the spacing between elements the photographer could sacrifice sharpness for an increased depth of field.

Ernest Purdum
8-Dec-2005, 15:01
Mark, when you speak of different wavelengths you are talking about chromatic aberration which, though intentionally present in some early soft focus lenses, is a problem with panchromatic, let alone color, films. Much more commonly, spherical aberration is used to produce the softened effect. The designer can just leave enough spherical aberration in so that images made at large apertures will be quite soft, or he can induce the aberration by arranging for element separation. The latter approach has been used with both Petzval and anastigmat lenses.Some of the anastigmats were quite versatile since they could be as sharp as other lenses of their period, yet soft when desired without necessarily using large apertures. Good examples are several Cooke types and the Graf "Variable". The name of the Graf lens came from the fact that changing element separation resulted in focal length variation.

Ted Harris
8-Dec-2005, 16:10
Mark, actually we are down to 2 + 1 manufacturers. The Rodenstock Imagons were discontinued about a year or a bit more ago although there are a scattered few available new on the odd dealer's shelf. For example, I found a new on at Calumet in Boston about 6 months ago. I say 2 + 1 because I am not sure I am comfortable including Congo as a 'high end' manufacturer. largely because of the seeming variability of their quality control.

William Mortensen
8-Dec-2005, 16:25
Right you are, Ernest! I was thinking of very early soft focus lenses which, though rarer, I'm more familiar with. Spherical aberration produces a similar, but much more predictable effect achromatically.

Another good example of a soft focus lens that can be adjusted by unscrewing the *front* element is certain Wollensak Velostigmats. I think these are the most common soft focus lenses out there, often priced quite low. Many people have them and don't realize what they are.