Why would you shot a negative with soft focus? Once it's soft it's soft. Instead shot sharp, and create soft focus in the darkroom when you print. IMHO
Why would you shot a negative with soft focus? Once it's soft it's soft. Instead shot sharp, and create soft focus in the darkroom when you print. IMHO
You would shoot a negative with soft focus because the effect is different. Most soft focus lenses rely on uncorrected speherical aberration. When you use such a lens on your camera, the highlights of the picture show halation i.e., the highlights spread into the sorrounding darker areas, which provides the so-called shimmering quality. A good example is Ansel Adam's "Lodgepole Pines". When you use soft focus in the darkroom, it is the shadows that spread into the highlights. The latter is an effect I do not care for, although that is a personal aesthetic call to make. Cheers, DJ.
Not to mention that it's damned difficult to contact print an 8x10 softly.
During the late teens Weston used an 18" Wollensak Verito on his 8x10 Century.
Another suggestion that is certainly not the same but harkens back to Steichen and other pioneers would be a pinhole. Soft/sharp and interesting effects but you need lots of light/time of exposure. Again for $34-3500.00 a lot of good used or new soft focus lenses could be had. Also, a #3 shutter has a slow top speed of 1/125 which could also limit shooting at the wide open ? stop of 4.5. You may have to invest in several ND filters if you're doing landscapes or outdoor portraits.
Again, Good Luck. FWB
Renee You might want to give
http://www.jay-tepper.com/
a looksy. He always has GOOD soft focus lenses, and is very knowledgible about such things (good prices too and a RETURN POLICY! Also give this guy's ebay "for sale " page a gander.
userid=dagor77@earthlink.net
Right now he has a ---- 15" F 5.6 Spencer Port-Land --- selling for $69.00 with less than a day left, and NO RESERVE.
"Ansel Adams used a smaller version of this lens ..." snip
Happy Shootin' -P-dawg
Note that the new Cooke lens is a design copy of the Pinkham-Smith, which was the favorite lens of Stieglitz, White et al. As I remember, Stieglitz had an early monopoly on the Smith lens, handing them out to the favored but witholding them from the masses, least the lens "fall into the wrong hands." And BTW, don't forget the Graf Variable lens, with dial-in soft focus-- it makes beautiful pictures.
Hi everyone - thought I'd jump into your discussion with some details about the new Cooke Portrait PS945 lens, since I'm one of the instigators at Cooke who thought up the idea of making a modern reproduction of the original Pinkham & Smith Visual Quality Series IV lens for 4x5 format photography. Here's the answer to a couple of your questions: 1. Yes, the new lens will be multi-coated and color corrected for all types of modern film, unlike the original.
2. What gives the Pinkham & Smith lenses their distinctive look is the reliance on hand correcting multiple surfaces of the glass, which is very different from what other lens manufacturers did. The reason P&S could get away with hand rubbing each and every piece of glass, was probably because they never made their lenses in quantities great enough to make it unfeasible to do so. It created (what our Academy Award winning chief optical designer at Cooke says is) a higher order of spherical abberation that gives the highlights that unique Pinkham & Smith luminescent quality. (It's such a lovely effect, that the Cooke designers decided to incorporate it into a new soft focus attachment for one of our cine lenses used for feature films.) If you're interested, there is more technical description of the various types of soft focus effects on the product page for the Cooke PS945 lens at www.cookeoptics.com.
F. Holland Day, one of the original master impressionist photographers tried silk and reverse negative printing, but it didn't give him the exact diffused effect he was looking for. He approached Mr. Smith at Pinkham & Smith and told him what he was looking for. Whether Mr. Smith did the hand rubbing himself or had someone else make the first true soft focus lens is debatable, but Day was so happy with the result he told his cousin, Alvin Langdon Coburn, who ended up owning at least 12 Pinkham & Smith lenses during his career (they're at the Eastman House in Rochester).
You can get a soft focus effect several different ways, but maybe Mr. Smith's care and attention to detail were the reason why F. Holland Day, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Eduard Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz and Clarence White are still known today for their stunning photographs! The best I could determine from my research was that the P&S lenses were virtually all commissioned by individuals during the early days. By Smith's own admission printed in a P&S product catalog, the company never spent any time actively marketing their lenses but relied instead on word of mouth. I originally thought that by the time the Visual Quality IV was made, it would have become an assembly line affair - I was proven wrong. The Visual Quality IV lenses Cooke took apart in England to examine revealed hand figured surfaces. Those brilliant (I think they are!) optical technicians at Cooke were then able to use modern glasses and coatings to match exactly the image characteristics of the original -- in their own words. (I'm told they did a happy dance; they do enjoy producing a thing of beauty.)
There are other differences between what our new lens can do and other methods of achieving soft focus effects: 1. The out of focus areas don't look muddy, they look velvety 2. The out of focus areas in the background AND the foreground look equally good. 3. There is a roundness of form that takes the edge off but appears sharp at the same time. 4. At f/4.5, wide open, the highlights look like they're generating their own light.
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