A recent thread asked the question, "Was there really a lens designed for portra iture?" I am amazed that most answered 'no' which is incorrect. There WAS such a lens and I used it for thousands of portraits in the late seventies. The lens w as made by Kodak and the name Portra-Ektar seems to ring in my memory. It was an amazing lens in that if you stopped it down to minimum, it was very sharp. If y ou shot it wide open, it was a fuzzy as puting a half-inch of Vaseline on your f ront element of your super-sharp APO-Whatever! We used it for portraits by testi ng what f-stop to use to just take the edge off the super sharpness that delineated every 'zit' on some persons face. As I recall, we used it at about f-11 or f-16, and the image appreared sharp but just soft enough to mush out those 'zits'! We used Photegenic portrait strobes and balanced the strobe light out put to match the exposure for the F stop we we re using. It was a magnificent lens, designed specifically for portraiture. I wi ll make some LD phone calls to try to find out the correct name and focal length and post it on this site. For portraits....it was one helluva lens. To answer t he question about a lens made for portraits...the answer is not yes, but hell YE S. And a a fine one at that! Richard Boulware - Denver.
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