A new article by Jeroen Bruggeman has just been posted:
http://www.largeformatphotography.info/portrait-lenses/
Please feel free to leave comments here.
Printable View
A new article by Jeroen Bruggeman has just been posted:
http://www.largeformatphotography.info/portrait-lenses/
Please feel free to leave comments here.
Bruggeman says that the Fujinon f8.5 300C is a Tessar design, being that it's a four element lens.
However, when I refer to that lens as a Tessar, on this forum, I get corrected and told that it's not actually a Tessar
The Nikon/Nikkor f9 300M is a true Tessar design. I understand that the Fujinon 300C is not a true Tessar design, although it has four elements.
What is it?
All four elements being airspaced would classify it as a dialyte. The tessar Fujinon lens was
the L series, similar to the Nikkor Q (the single-coated predecessor to the M).
Had me....Quote:
The appeal of large format is the combination of high resolution and beautiful tonality.
Lost me. How can I take the article, or author seriously after this introduction?Quote:
Moreover, 5x7” (and larger) negatives make possible breath-taking contact prints on baryte paper, too, far superior to crummy digital “baryte” prints.
Oh well I guess you take what you can. Beyond that I quite enjoyed the article.
Excelent well balanced article by someone who actually makes portraits, of more than one person too. Find the authors work on Flickr.
Drew,
In other words, Bruggeman was incorrect when he stated that the four element Fujinon f8.5 300C is a Tessar.
The way I understand it, Fuji was able to eliminate the problem of internal flare from air to glass interfaces with their new improved EBC coating.
They began using air spacing between the lens elements instead of cementing them. That helped to eliminate the problem of lens separation.
The latest Fujinon lenses, the "CM-W"s', are air spaced. Obviously, the "C"s' are also air spaced.
Therefore, even though the 300C is four element lens, the air spacing changed its classification from a Tessar to a Dialite.
Correct?
^^^ Not from every single reference that I've read, no. All Fujinon-C's are modified dialytes. Modified to offer slightly wider coverage than older dialyte designs. But... I'm just a novice who's reading as much as he can....
I agree, Eric. It's a problem with too many online article -- no editors. Any half decent editor would have handed the article back to author and asked, "Why do you want to shoot yourself in the foot like that?" and then ordered, "Fix it". Maybe the author thought he'd be endearing himself to like-minded readers (or maybe he was just venting), but LF photographers -- some quite accomplished -- are embracing digital printing in ever growing numbers. It just happens I came on this article after reading this one:
http://theagnosticprint.org/art-and-craft/#more-230
Maybe I overreacted. I didn't meant to offend the author who did write an otherwise very nice article with lots of useful information included.
As I said in the first sentence, I tested a series of lenses "towards their usefulness for portraits in the broadest sense". Disassembling them to verify if, say, a 300mm Fujinon-C is a Dialyte or a Tessar was not part of my tests, and information on lens types I collected on the Internet. However, if somebody can prove me wrong, e.g. by showing an official Fuji document rather than speculating, I will correct my text (after a month or so to give others a chance to react as well).
To Jay's comment on my comparison of baryte prints with digital prints: I do make and like digital prints a lot (anything to be printed large), but my point was that if you make a contact print and put it side by side with a same-size digital "baryte" print of the same negative, then the latter looks rather sad. This is why collectors pay so much more for contact prints of large negatives!
Jeroen Bruggeman.
Tessar: 4 elements in 3 groups
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tessar
Dialyte: 4 air spaced elements
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialyte_lens
Fujinon-C 300mm: 4 elements in four groups
http://fujifilm.jp/personal/filmandc...t/compact.html
http://translate.google.com/translat...2Fcompact.html
In any case, I found the article very useful and an interesting read!
Cheers,
Andreas
I agree with Mark.
It has become taboo to compare a silver gelatin print to one produced with a printer. Some get very defensive about their digital output while others sound apologetic about their 'traditional' work. We're all free to choose our workflow and to express our opinions about it. No need to get defensive or apologize for our artistic choices.
It wasn't the author's opinion of his craft that bothered me, it was his slander of others' craft. Talk about defensive! You're entitled to your opinion, and the author to his, however narrow or ill-informed it might seem to me, but in a piece that wants to be taken seriously about technical aspects of craft, and which relies on judgement, the comment seemed to me out of place and set the wrong tone for what followed, but that's just my opinion. But then , I don't believe journalistic principles apply only to textbooks, either, so we're bound to disagree.
Renato,
I don't think it's become taboo, at all. In fact, I'd say it's becoming necessary, and much more interesting, when the comparison is made by someone intimately familiar with both processes, and equally accomplished in both. The author made no such comparison, he simply degraded an entire craft in an offhanded way, and I see little in that to admire or respect. To be clear, I've never made an ink print of any kind, and I've not seen many that represent the state of that art, but the ones I have seen, and what I've learned from the people who make them instills in me a respect for what is a different, and potentially incredibly beautiful process, and for the people who dedicate themselves to advancing it.
It does seem a bit odd to me that in the opening paragraph of an article about portrait lenses that the author would make such a comment about a very specific type of output. What do digital baryte prints have to do with "tests of lenses for 4x5” and 5x7” negatives, targeted towards their usefulness for portraits in the broadest sense"?
Well, as photographers our choice of words are not likely to be as well crafted as our images.
Nate Potter, Austin TX.
Jay,
If I didn't listen to and learn from people with whom I disagree or who have quirks that bother me I'd miss out on lots of knowledge.
And that they have something useful to teach you places them beyond reproach? That's a strange attitude. The author wants his readers to have confidence in his judgement, as online images can't tell the whole story he intends to tell, but his judgement about subtle qualities is severely damaged (in my mind) by his careless and baseless comment about ink printing.
As I've said, I did find the article as a whole interesting and useful, but that doesn't mean the article or specific comments are beyond critique.
Hmmm.. I have 150/2.8 Xenotar, which indeed was doubling contours.. Until i realized it was not mounted properly. Once i took it apart and recleaned and mounted right (rear element was not screwed in properly) - presto.. It suddenly became deadly sharp at 2.8 and no funky odd double-contours, but pretty darn nice bokeh..
Joroen - no need to take a lens apart. If you don't believe those of us who use these lenses on a constant basis (and are not speculating whatsoever), you can simply link the
Fuji brochures with exploded diagrams on Kerry Thalmann's Fuji site. The current Fuji C's
have very high contrast due to the multicoating, and also have better coverage than
tessars. But color rendition, detail, and contrast are very similar to the late Nikkor M tessars. You would have difficulty telling shots apart if both style lenses were shaded.
Gem - The CMW lenses are just the current offering of Fuji's W and NW series of plasmats.
The C's are four-element airspaced dialytes, so with even fewer air/glass interfaces. The
coating solved most issues of flare long ago. But I find I do have to be careful to use a
deep bellows shade when using a 450C on high-flare open sky situations with 4x5 format
due to the enormous image circle it takes in. But these kinds of modern lenses also involve
various refinements from old school simple less classifications. When I want to know about
the history in general I look it up in Kingslake.
The Fujinon brochure (higher up in this thread) convinced me that the Fujinon-C is a Dialyte, and I changed the text accordingly. Thank you guys for pointing this out to me. It also shows that crowd-sourced editing is fast and efficient.
Because of the superior quality of baryte contact prints, many photographers and their clients are drawn to large format, so I keep that at the top.
Jeroen.
Agreed, but putting it on the reference page makes it a bit of a primer for someone looking for introductory knowledge about portrait lenses for large format. While it's an interesting sampling of whatever lenses were at hand, only one, the Heliar, was meant as a portrait lens.
The others were general-use or meant for something completely different, like the Ronar and Artar. Those two process lenses fall far outside what is usually thought of as a portrait lens, (to dark, too sharp). Which isn't to say one can't use them as portrait lenses, but then, what lens can't you use for portraits? The Ronar seems to get the highest praise of all, ("Portraits shot with this lens feature an intergalactic gorgeousness... with a butter-smooth transition from sharp to unsharp areas, divine bokeh at all apertures, yummy tonality, and colors better than in real life...") But it would be near my last choice for traditional portraiture. So the article describes more what the author thinks portraiture should be, and less about what in the traditional sense makes a good portrait lens.
Nothing is above reproach and I have learned not to take anyone's word at face value, not even trusted sources.
This article, as I view any article/book/..., is just an opinion as far as I'm concerned; even text books are flawed and skewed by opinion, right or wrong the winners write history.
What can be important about an article like this is when the info matches other sources or my own experience and how the author describes the differences so that if I have one of the lenses I can have some feel for how another might relate.
Opposite to "sampling of whatever lenses there were at hand", my sampling was quite thoughtful and based on extensive research, although confined to (approximately) post-1930 lenses, and with some omissions explicated at the end. Quite a few lenses were not mentioned not because of my ignorance about them, but because I do know them.
For Ronars and all those other lenses that were not designed to be portrait lenses, it seems to me more useful to find out open-mindedly what those lenses can do for us, rather than to discard them for tradition's sake. Had we taken traditions too seriously, we would now be painters (on cave walls), as photography would not have been invented.
It's certainly a valid set of experiments, simply because we often find ourselves improvising with lenses we routinely travel with instead of something big and clunky we might prefer in the studio: how does a typical modern lens perform wide open, for example,
with respect to out-of-focus characteristics. ... generally not very good, but some are
certainly better than others in this respect.
I had my lens cleaned and serviced first, as the shutter was in-accurate. When I then mounted it, I could clearly feel that the rear part well-fitted the shutter, so this might not have been the problem. For sure, I didn't have "funky odd double-contours" with my 80mm Xenotar on my Rolleiflex, but neither of my Xenotars was very sharp wide open, and bokeh was a far cry from Heliar's or Lanthar's.
Of course. Go for it.
Thanks, Tuan, for pointing out this article.
I hope it doesn't jack the price of the Apo-Lanthar up to even more absurd levels than it already is.
It would have been nice to see his opinion of the results of a DAGOR.
What is specially valuable about this article is that it is based on a number of years of first hand experience, rather that collective third and second hand knowledge learned by constant mindless repetition on forums such as this. Its conclusions are also supported elsewhere, such as on Ken Lee's site and others. Leave the stupid nitpcking and self-agrandisement to the stupid nitpickers and self-agrandisers.
My apologies, it seemed more like an "if you don't like it, go write your own article" response. When one does write a opinionn article for a reference page, I'm afraid one must expect a few opinionated responses. For that, the author has my sympathies!
There have been several generations of lenses produced expressly for large format portraiture. The first generation was the Petzval portrait lenses, of which the fastest were designated "portrait lenses" because they were fast, and could minimize long exposure times.
The second generation began with the Dallmeyer Patent Portrait, a fast Petzval that had an adjustment for inducing spherical aberration to spread the very shallow depth of field. The extra depth of field didn't really make much difference, but people liked the soft look of the spherical aberration, and many new designs added more and more aberration for softness' sake.
The third generation, (which would run through modern lenses) is back to fast, sharp lenses, the speed being to minimize depth of field rather than for speed of exposure, (not so much an issue with modern film).
The article was about using general-use and special-use (other than portrait) lenses as portrait lenses. Such use is fine, and excellent portraiture can be done with such lenses, but in an article specifically about "Large Format Lenses for Portraits", this should be mentioned. Just opinion, disagreements are respected.
It's possible that the sentence was not worded in the best way. The author has corrected it in a revised version (so that this detail doesn't distract). However I don't think it is "baseless" to assert that a digital print doesn't look good compared side-by-side to a contract print of the same size. In fact I am curious how many would even disagree. This is not a comment on the craft of digital printers, just on the limits of a pixel-based medium.
It's an informative article that covers one aspect of a hugely vast and historic topic of large format portrait lens options. It's sort of the post-modern options rather than a historical review.
Many of the photos are very nice, but the ones with the black backgrounds do little to show bokeh or contrast because of that black background. A future revision might show images with a natural background if they want to be for maximum subjective comparison.
I'd contend that sharpness isn't as important as the author seeks with large format because the degree of enlargement is much smaller than with small film or digital, but I recognize photographers' preference for sharpness is all over the scale, especially when lenses do double duty for general purposes uses. Thus if it's important to him, it's probably important to many other people.
The mention of the heliar as an option (and a good option!) is that there's a whole world of wonderful old triplets that are great for portraits. He may not have written about this, as it's probably as big a topic as tessars are, but triplets and their often make nice nice portrait lenses. If he didn't write more about this, it's probably just reflective of the individuals experience. I've used some triplets, but haven't used lanthars and ronars for example. Getting into the galli, soft, and peztval stuff is surely biting off more than one can chew for a simple webpage, so skipping it is probably wise on the author's part, and will help keep prices in check.
It's baseless because he doesn't bother to qualify what he means by "doesn't look good", if he'd been careful enough to use even that loaded wording. The idea that such wholesale judgments can be made is the carelessness I referred to. If he'd just posted two lists of lenses, one headed "These lenses are good for portraits" and another headed "These lenses are crap for portraits", we'd probably want to know more about how he came to his conclusions, whether or not we agreed with him. By establishing in his opening paragraph that he's prone to wholesale judgments about subjective distinctions, he damaged his credibility regarding what followed. I'm not suggesting we throw the baby out with the bathwater and assume everything he wrote is of no value, but I'm glad he revised his opening paragraph. And I don't mean anything personal in my critique, I'm sure the author is a fine fellow.
Jeroen,
Thanks for the article. Seems like it has been a long time since someone prepared a new article on the LF Home Page.
Those and other old lenses are great, and for people interested, I explicitly referred to Galli's webpage, so it was not an omission that I wasn't aware of. I had drawn a (vague) boundary at around the nineteen twenties, for the general reason that the performances of old portrait lenses are better documented, and people interested can more easily find information about them, and for the personal reason that I don't want to work with lenses without a shutter (and can't afford to send off a series of colossal brass lenses to S.K.Grimes to mount them in gargantuan Ilex #5 shutters, although I've considered the option).
To lower the price of the Lanthar, I also said that it's image circle is too small for front movements, it's colors are bad, it's less sharp than the Sironar-S, and it's radio activity will kill you instantly. What else would you want me to say?
If I can borrow your Dagor, I will test it for you! I've seen fabulous landscapes by Dagors, but was in doubt about its possibilities as a portrait lens; the examples I found seemed not to improve upon my favourite lenses. The only way to find out is to test one myself, but they happen to be too expensive to just buy one to try, and in Europe there is hardly anyone who owns one and from whom I could borrow. If I had been a landscape photographer, I would certainly have bought one, and then would have also used it for portraits if the occasion arises.
for what its worth.. i was hoping to read about lens's for 8x10.
i also have the opinion, that a portrait is mainly an image, of mainly the face, that, expresses the I as a whole, not the whole body nor a scene with a body for good measure.?
so my opinion is worthless as i didnt really read it and didnt really look at the pictures.
far out this the most interesting fred i've red...
It's perfectly fine to take photo's of faces only, if you wish, and my test results equally apply to that interpretation of portraits. For 8x10", my results suggest that Tessars, Dialytes (not MC), and Heliars will be good, in addition to lenses that only exist/make sense for 8x10, so just translate focal lengths. I would say anything between 300mm and 480mm will do, but for close ups I would start at 360mm. Image circles that are tight at infinity will be large for portraits as you want them to be. Much more knowledgeable than I am on 8x10 is Jim Galli, who has a wonderful website (eh, just right now it doesn't work, hope it will come back.)
The problem with assessing dagors is that they, like tessars, were made for the better part
of a century, so have quite an internal evolution and variety of their own which can't be given a simple sterotype. I've simply used the later ones, and mostly for 8x10, which were
exquistely color-corrected; and yes, I did sometimes use them for landscape. But it is
really for portraiture that these lenses sing. The internal contrast of midtones and highlights is fabulous, and the nature of the edges is different from either the old-style
official portrait lenses and modern plastmats etc. A very important lens category in this
discussion.
Although I do not agree with every statement, I do appreciate the article and agree 100% that if you lay a well printed gelatin silver print alongside a well printed digital print, the gelatin will win hands down. I believe the problem is that too many people now are so used to the clinical sharpness, and strong edge contrast of digital images that they do not appreciate the beauty of an analog image.