Over the years of using soft focus lenses, few things learned.
*Focusing is no where near as easy as one might believe. Often focus using high contrast difference between lines helps and focus at the lens aperture use to create the image.
*"Hard" lighting or higher lighting ratios matter. Soft focus lenses do not reveal their personalities with soft diffused light well at all.
*Film formats smaller than 5x7 is a significant dis-advantage. Ideally, the film negatives are contact printed from an 8x10 film negative. This has to be done or experienced to get an appreciation for the difference in print quality.
The history of this 6 disc Jmagon is rather interesting, It was originally purchased in Paris France 35 years ago according to the original owner who is an artist-photographer in Paris. He never had a proper camera for it, but purchased it due to it's rarity and collect-ability, during the time he owned it, this Jmagon never made an image. Previous owner has reached a point in his life where doing art and photography has become a challenge. He was happy to learn this Jmagon ended up in a good home and will be used to make images again. He did not want this lens to end up with a collector that will place it in a trophy case never to make an image again. His rarest cameras and lenses ended up at the French Museum of Photography. One of his request was to see some images made with this six disc Jmagon.
That will now change as I'm going to have a flange made for it soon and mounted on a Sinar lens board to be used with the Sinar & Sinar shutter on the Sinar 5x7. This Imagon joins the 250mm & 360mm Imagon completing the set for 5x7. At some point, I'll post some images made with this six disc Jmagon after the mechanical over head is done.
This portrait has been posted else where. It was done with a 360mm Imagon, H7.7 Disc, 5x7 Sinar and Sinar shutter, hot lighting-no diffusion.
Bernice
Zeiss "SOFTAR"s do very much the same thing optically.
Wilhelm (Sarasota)
This is becoming more instructive for me the further the conversation goes. The second point in particular as I only have a 4x5 kit. Probably not the right thread for this but is it a game breaker not to have something bigger for soft focus? I'm just a bit time user of my 300mm Imagon, so I suppose I need to be realistic about the need to move to 5x7 or 8x10 from a cost perspective.
Anyway the insights are still useful, as with the higher lighting point as well.
Colin
It is good when we find an assertion such as Bernice has made because we have to make it to know it. Speculation is useless. I just GOTTA see for myself. That's the wonderful kind of thing that breaks the internet bull. ...and ironically, we cannot show our outcome on today's poor monitors.
This is the kind of stuff that makes LF alive!
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I would not dismiss 4x5 out of hand as a platform for exploring soft focus. That's what I started with when I first discovered the lure of the Wollensak Verito. 5x7 and 8x10 do offer advantages. For one, you'll find a much larger selection of soft focus lenses intended for the 8x10 format. And contact prints (if that is your workflow) are larger and easier to see. But 4x5 is definitely a viable platform/format for soft focus.
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