OK, what lens was it?

[Jim Galli]

http://www.shorpy.com/node/15191?size=_original#caption

Cheap acromatic meniscus on an old folder? The circles up in the highlights in the trees are weird. Looks like an Aero Ektar but there are a thousand reasons why it isn't. So what was it?

[Jason Greenberg Motamedi]

Or perhaps a Periskop-type lens? They can produce those circles.

[Jon Shiu]

Could be from a box camera. Oh, I see it was from a professional studio, so probably not.

Jon

[jp]

The shape of the circles make it appear to be overcorrected for spherical aberation. Probably not a cheap meniscus (which I'd think would be more likely uncorrected), but some other cheap lens.

[Mark Sawyer]

Harris & Ewing was a huge studio/news media outlet with a lot of employees, (http://www.bizjournals.com/washington/stories/2000/11/13/focus8.html). By that I'd say it was probably a fairly decent camera and lens. The only tell-tale I can pick up on is that hard bright line at the edge of the out-of-focus specular highlights, kinda like the Aero Ektar, but the bright line here is at the outside edge (farthest from the center of the image), where with the AE that bright edge goes all the way 'round with a little more brightness on the inside edge.

Definitely not a meniscus, which would have had significant coma at the outer areas with such an open aperture.

[Jim Galli]

It's not really sharp anywhere. So I thought maybe VPK, but then I looked and it says it's a glass negative. A curious one.

[jp]

All the little black specs indicate it's a glass negative. The emulsion was fragile or poorly taken care of.

[Petzval Paul]

I have a very early rolleicord with a Zeiss triotar that produces a similar image. I believe that there were many triplets like that used on a lot of contemporary folding cameras and such.

[Bill_1856]

Rapid Rectilinear. Ain't it beautiful!!!

[Ole Tjugen]

I don't think that's an RR - it isn't sharp enough!

I woudl guess at a triplet, or maybe HALF an RR?

On the other hand, it looks to me like the aperture is too large for a half RR. So I'll go for triplet, or F:3.5 Tessar (Zeiis had a habit of overcorrecting aberrations at times).

[Ian Greenhalgh]

Could be a tessar or a triplet, both can have those glowing outlines to the out of focus highlights.

Really hard to judge too much because it looks both front focused and suffering from camera shake.

Hard to believe this was taken by a pro, surely a pro would have focused correctly and known how to avoid camera shake?

[goamules]

I bet it was a common RR on a common 4x5 or 5x7 negative. Printed, scanned perhaps from that print, enlarged to the web to huge sizes, no wonder it lost sharpness. Cool shot.

[Keith Fleming]

I am speculating out of curiosity, but August in D.C. is horribly hot and humid. The rolled up sleeves (and the thick haze in the background) surely reflect the conditions on the day of the photograph. Could heat and very high humidity cause the film emulsion to swell to the point it affected sharpness? Or perhaps cause the film's support to buckle in the film holder?

Keith

[Jac@stafford.net]

I am speculating out of curiosity, but August in D.C. is horribly hot and humid. The rolled up sleeves (and the thick haze in the background) surely reflect the conditions on the day of the photograph. Could heat and very high humidity cause the film emulsion to swell to the point it affected sharpness? Or perhaps cause the film's support to buckle in the film holder?

Keith

It is a glass plate negative.