Several years ago i acquired an Ilex Protoplastic 10.5" f4.5 with the extreme soft focus rear cell. I've found very little information about this lens and have only seen one others that had the medium soft back sell. It appears these were made in the 1920's and came with a choice of non soft focus, medium soft and extreme soft rear cells. The one I have is the extreme soft version. My lens is mounted in a semi working black number 5 shutter that I had cleaned and refurbished as much as possible with a shutter of that age. I say it's semi working because Bulb and Time work just fine but the shutter speeds are seriously off but consistent. The best shutter speed is the 1/25 which is actually 1/18 of a second.
1/18 of a second makes it difficult to shoot wide open under bright conditions so I purchased an 8 stop variable neutral density filter and put it on my Fuji X-T3 and use it as a metering system. When I set the ISO at 100 and the shutter speed at 1/20 and aperture at f4.5 or the desired f stop, when the exposure is correct I'm good to go with the Ilex.
I took it to the mountains this week and did a series of exposures on FP-4 at f4.5, 5.6 and 8. At f8 the lens sharpens up a little but it's still quite soft. I shot them along a stream hoping I'd get some nice halation around specular highlights. The images attached are in order from left to right, the first one I made a few years ago at f5.6, the second f8, third f5.6 and 4th wide open at f4.5. Looking at the images I think I could have picked a better and more simple subject. This was just a little complex. Also the images are coming up darker when I posted them for some reason. Please excuse them, it's not the scans.
I'm hoping to get back into it this week and will post more as I get them. I probably will do a portrait or like Jim Gali, an old car if I can find one.
Please post your thoughts.
Don
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