soft focus lenses

[jnantz]

i know, its kind of a dumb title for this thread....

i have a handful of different lenses, some are
tessar design, some plasmat, some RR, anastigmat, petsval and other "stuff"
i also have a fast lens that some say are portrait lens, others say it is a soft focus lens
and still others say it is just a regular old run of the mill lens.

so, my question is, if a lens is fast and has enough aberration from the out of focus area
to make a pleasing image, with a nice softness to it can it be considered a soft focus lens ?

aren't the names "soft focus" " landscape" and "portrait" lenses just marketing labels/ "tag" anyways ?
any lens can be a soft, landscape or portrait lens and if someone knows how to use it right.
i mean i've photographed with super sharp+contrasty modern 35mm pentax+nikon lenses and
used them in such a way that people thought the photographs were made with some sort of vintage
xyz labelled landscape/portrait lens .. and it was about as corrected a lens as you can get...

[Bob Salomon]

Go to Google and search for Monte Zucker and see his work. He specialized in soft focus portraits of women, same for Timor Horvath and Al Gilbert.

[mdarnton]

Someone will certainly come along and set me right in minute detail, but I believe that the technical rule for "soft focus" regards a visible abundance of spherical aberration, and the somewhat looser folk definition adds chromatic aberration to that description. Visually that means that at the point of sharp focus, sharpness is not perfect but somewhat more or less diffused by those two mechanisms, and that this effect also probably extends somewhat ahead of and behind the point of perfect focus, but to be strictly to that definition, the actual point of focus is where soft happens to focus, and it can't be sharp. So, your crispy Pertzval, and billion-lines-per-mm-resolving very fast lens, no, they ain't "soft focus" though they may be "portrait". Then there's the V2 folk definition, which includes stuff like being out of focus (which actually is "soft", right?). Notice that bokeh isn't in here anywhere.

Then there's the definition of "portrait lens" which is broadly any lens anyone anywhere might at some time have used to shoot a portrait, for whatever reason, including bokeh, focal length, real or imagined pictorial benefits, high speed or limited DOF, or that was described by the original maker as a "portrait lens" for more or less obscure or marketing reason, or by various people because it was the lens they had on the camera that day that they used for a portrait. If you look for "portrait lens" on Ebay, this last type is the type that shows up the most.

Part of the problem with the term soft focus is that, as the guys who write dictionaries know, how a word is currently used is a lot more important than how someone with a stick up his tail defined it 100 years ago, so as time moves on "soft focus" becomes more and more what people want it to be, less and less what some old technical definition says.

[Randy]

...I believe that the technical rule for "soft focus" regards a visible abundance of spherical aberration, and the somewhat looser folk definition adds chromatic aberration to that description.

That's my guess. I have one particular lens that I assume falls into this category - 190mm Wollaston Meniscus (Reinholds). What I find particularly pleasing about it is - when the "sweet spot" is found, say about f/8, where you have just a bit of glow in the lighter areas, the area of sharpest focus doesn't fall of rapidly in front or behind the subject you focused on, but the fall-off is so very gradual that you don't really notice it in the scene. That really sort of fits the term "soft focus" quite well.

[Alan Gales]

Most of the portraits that I have shot have been with normal lenses. Most of the landscapes I have shot have been with slightly long lenses. I've always used wide angle lenses for getting in close.

Labels are just labels.

[goamules]

i know, its kind of a dumb title for this thread....
aren't the names "soft focus" " landscape" and "portrait" lenses just marketing labels/ "tag" anyways ?
any lens can be a soft, landscape or portrait lens and if someone knows how to use it right.
i mean i've photographed with super sharp+contrasty modern 35mm pentax+nikon lenses and
used them in such a way that people thought the photographs were made with some sort of vintage
xyz labelled landscape/portrait lens ....

No, you are wrong about soft focus. If a lens creates a soft result, it's a soft focus lens. If you manipulate an image in Photoshop or use a filter to make a soft image, you didn't magically turn the lens into a soft focus lens. If you want to try to prove your statement, take a soft focus picture with a non soft lens type, and report back to us with the image.

[jnantz]

No, you are wrong about soft focus. If a lens creates a soft result, it's a soft focus lens. If you manipulate an image in Photoshop or use a filter to make a soft image, you didn't magically turn the lens into a soft focus lens. If you want to try to prove your statement, take a soft focus picture with a non soft lens type, and report back to us with the image.

i never said or suggested i was using photoshop or "filter-trickery?" to manipulate images. just
knowledge of how to focus in certain ways to work with DOF of modern sharp/contrasty or non labelled "portrait / soft focus" lenses
and i get similar results to using something labelled " soft focus lens" that i might have. gomules, i've been using old, brass,
portrait and soft focus lenses since the 90s, not since jim galli started writing his blog about them ...
and i've been using other techniques with other lenses since before i bought "portrait" or "soft focus" lenses.
i just asked about lens taxonomy, forgetting speed=portrait so the exposure wasn't 1 minute, nothing really worth getting upset about ...
i'd post images but some are from small formats, and i really don't want to fill this website up with images made from
negatives smaller than 4x5, and causing a riot.

[Mark Sawyer]

...aren't the names "soft focus" " landscape" and "portrait" lenses just marketing labels/ "tag" anyways ?
any lens can be a soft, landscape or portrait lens and if someone knows how to use it right.

There have been several generations of lenses specifically labelled and intended as portrait lenses by their makers, and for specific reasons that have changed over time.

1st generation: The Petzval Portrait Lens. What made this lens a "portrait" lens was its speed, often f/3 to f/4 or so, which allowed for quicker exposures in the daguerreotype/collodion days where sitters had to remain motionless for multiple seconds.

2nd generation: The "soft" portrait lenses. These were the only lenses designed to have a specific aesthetic; just a touch of softness to smooth out wrinkles and blemishes on the skin. Not to be confused with the Pictorialist soft lenses, like the Verito, Pinkham & Smith, Port-Land, Plasticca, etc., which were much softer, and used as much for landscapes, street scenes, groups, and still-lifes as for portraits. But stopped down a bit, the Pictorialist lenses could be firmed up to what "official" soft portrait lenses (like the Cooke Portrait Lenses) gave. The Cooke Portrait Lenses are the epitome of this generation, followed closely by the Universal Heliars, explaining in part both their astronomical prices.

3rd generation: Modern portrait lenses, which have a longer-than-normal focal length, which gives a more pleasing perspective to the face, (i.e.: the nose doesn't seem to protrude from the facial plane as much).

You could also argue for an intermediate generation (between the 1st and 2nd) of very fast Rapid Rectilinear/Aplanat design lenses made for portraiture, like the Series II (f/4), III (f/4.5), and IV (f/6) Euryscops, as these were also intended and very often used for

Then there's the definition of "portrait lens" which is broadly any lens anyone anywhere might at some time have used to shoot a portrait...

Yup, if you can make a portrait with it, it must be a "Portrait Lens". We had a big hoo-hah over this a few years ago when the LFF Powers-That-Be put an article on the reference page on "portrait lenses" that listed Sironars, Symmars, Ronars, Artars, Fujinon-A's, C's and -W's, etc. as "Portrait Lenses" It's still up as an authoritative source for information on "Portrait Lenses", and I think it's an embarrassment to the forum...

http://www.largeformatphotography.info/portrait-lenses/

[jp]

A normal sharp lens can have good spherical aberration like a soft lens, but not likely when it's in focus. So if you take an out of focus photo, it will be a needlessly soft photo.

A good soft focus lens has SA in the background to have a pleasing background, as well as in the focus spot at the same time, creating some additional apparent DOF. Then it can have a blend of good focus definition and smooth softness all at once.

A Nikon DC lens can do this if misused, but I'm guessing you'd say that if that's what you'd used.

Old school, a landscape lens such as a meniscus had a smaller aperture so that it was sharper. These probably predated the appreciation of softness for any purpose what so ever.

[Randy]

No, you are wrong about soft focus. If a lens creates a soft result, it's a soft focus lens. If you manipulate an image in Photoshop or use a filter to make a soft image, you didn't magically turn the lens into a soft focus lens. If you want to try to prove your statement, take a soft focus picture with a non soft lens type, and report back to us with the image.

....? what the...?