Contemporary soft-focus work

[William Mortensen]

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]

I use several vintage SF focus lenses for 14x17 work including Veritos, Vitax, Pinkham-Smith, Eidoscope, etc. Several of the images in this group were done this way. I also use them for some of my wet plate collodion 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]

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]

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]

"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.



Yousef

[Clive Russ]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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!