A lost era of Pictorial Lenses and Pictorialism?

[Steven Tribe]

This is, of course, very speculative - but I have one tangiable piece of evidence. And more evidence may be available in Museum cabinets.

The development of soft lens is usually attributed to Dallmeyer, whose patent Petzval redesign was able to reduce retouching work, whilst keeping a pleasing firm definition. The development of Pictorialism encouraged their use as well as promoting the adoption of more radical optical solutions - as can be seen in CCHarrison's articles.

How can it be then, that a Scottish Optician in Edinburgh (J.J.Liddell), whose business closed in 1858, produced a lens with a -ve front lens and a +ve rear lens that can only produce soft images? This is a bit like the Dallmeyer Bergheim (or de Pulligny's landscape lens) - although the sequence of lenses is reversed.

J.J.Liddell was in the generation of Opticians who worked closely with the Edinburgh/ St. Andrews Calotypists in the 1850's. I know very little about their range of subjects or their surviving work. Of course, this could be just a "deviant" photographer asking for a "odd" design to match his/her artistic leanings. But perhaps there was a Pictorial School? Museum images of preserved photograph portfolios are not available on-line.

I was convinced this must be a soft/pictorial lens - with something more to offer than than the "out of focus" area of a Petzval. It was lent to someone with great deal (infinitely more, in fact) experience of 19th century processes, last weekend. This is what he writes to-day:


I have mounted the lens on a board and it has an interesting signature when looking at the ground glass. Center part is sharp with some soft glow but then things very quickly gets crazy. Everything is smeared out but with a soft and nice change from sharp to not so sharp.

Perhaps there were a whole range of optics produced by opticians in collaboration with early pioneer photographers seeking other than just replicas of reality?

[IanG]

Perhaps there were a whole range of optics produced by opticians in collaboration with early pioneer photographers seeking other than just replicas of reality?

History forgets the lesser known, your probably right.

Look at the amazing range of lenses tht Meyer produced in the 1930's and yet now we dismiss the company and idolise Schneider then relatively unknown, and treat Xeiss as a spent force. (LF lenses).

Were Liddell's in Hanover Square ? My Grandmother loved photography, she bought prints on her honeymoon made in the Lake Disrict over 100 years ago, but it's forgotten that Scotland was pre-eminent in early photography and also other fields.

Ian

[Mark Sawyer]

It may well be one of the most wonderful soft Pictorialist lenses ever made, but that doesn't mean that's what it was made for. Dallmeyer was more interested in "spreading the depth of field" than making soft images when he invented the first "soft focus" lenses. There are many people now, including myself, working with wide-open landscape lenses that were never meant to be used that way.

Unless we have writing by Liddell or a few images from that time showing the lens was used in that way, it's speculation at best...

I'll offer my own speculation that the "soft" look came in about as soon as it could, as the earliest processes (Daguerreotype, Calotype, collodion-based) weren't particularly good mediums for the soft look.

[Peter Yeti]

Look at the amazing range of lenses tht Meyer produced in the 1930's and yet now we dismiss the company and idolise Schneider then relatively unknown, and treat Xeiss as a spent force. (LF lenses).


Maybe slightly off-topic, but it's quite simple why Meyer disappeared as a major player in lens production in the western perception. They were locked behind the iron curtain after WWII. In eastern Europe they were still well-known until they were forced into VEB Pentacon, which made an end to this distinguished name.

Back to topic. Unfortunately, I'm quite ignorant of the really early photographic lenses. But I wonder which designs were commonly known at that time that could produce something else but a soft image or would not fall off very rapidly from the centre? Couldn't it be that this was just the best that a talented local optician could come up with?

[Steven Tribe]

Unless we have writing by Liddell or a few images from that time showing the lens was used in that way, it's speculation at best...

Indeed it is. There are plenty of written sources around in Scotland - and perhaps at Laycock Abbey too. But I can't find anything about the relationships between the Calotype groups and their opticians. Apart from Thomas Davidson who was symmetrical achromatic developer.


I'll offer my own speculation that the "soft" look came in about as soon as it could, as the earliest processes (Daguerreotype, Calotype, collodion-based) weren't particularly good mediums for the soft look.

Which was exactly my thinking. But there could have been a difference in imaging in "out of focus" areas which was appreciated.


Couldn't it be that this was just the best that a talented local optician could come up with?

Plenty of modified achromatic landscape lenses were available. Their different performance when opened up were well known according to J. Traill Taylor (another Scot!). Although mass producers, like Ross and Grubb, had appeared, there were still plenty of Opticians who made to customer orders.

[Sevo]

How can it be then, that a Scottish Optician in Edinburgh (J.J.Liddell), whose business closed in 1858, produced a lens with a -ve front lens and a +ve rear lens that can only produce soft images? This is a bit like the Dallmeyer Bergheim (or de Pulligny's landscape lens) - although the sequence of lenses is reversed.

It world not be the first product with a flaw - nor the first invention with a inherent flaw. Besides, people have made (sometimes odd) compromises - is the lens unusually (for the period) wide, long, fast or light? Is it sharp when used for a smaller format (the mass market of the period was visit card size)? And last but not least, is it still soft when used with the blue/UV only sensitive plates they had back then?



Perhaps there were a whole range of optics produced by opticians in collaboration with early pioneer photographers seeking other than just replicas of reality?


Given that it was harder to get a sharp than a soft lens at that time, it is very unlikely that someone made a lens that explicitly tried to be not sharp. People would not have ordered a specially designed blurry lens, when the majority of the lens shelf was filled with lenses with unintentional sharpness deficits. Maybe somebody even liked and used your lens, for its softness - but he'd still have found it among his rejects rather than ordering it to be made that very way...

[Sevo]

Maybe slightly off-topic, but it's quite simple why Meyer disappeared as a major player in lens production in the western perception. They were locked behind the iron curtain after WWII. In eastern Europe they were still well-known until they were forced into VEB Pentacon, which made an end to this distinguished name.

Well, the absorption into Pentacon was relatively late, the real issue was that the GDR believed in industrial scale production - which is a matter of numbers, and hence most feasible for small (and already less so for medium) format. Meyer actually grew considerably in GDR years and by the end, Meyer (now Pentacon) had pushed Zeiss (the Jena branch) right off the table and were even making many of the last remaining nominally Zeiss Jena camera lenses (including the last batches of GDR LF Tessars).

And there is the earlier issue of the dominating Zeiss trust that let few independent makers in Germany survive the crisis between the wars - among the few survivors, Schneider doubtlessly had the post-WWII advantage of being strictly in the West while Mayer was entirely stuck in the East, but that cannot explain the decline of all the other Western-only smaller lens makers (among them venerable industry pioneers like Steinheil and Voigtländer).

[IanG]

I started a new thread (http://www.largeformatphotography.info/forum/showthread.php?103379-Rise-and-fall-of-lens-manufacturers&p=1026890#post1026890) to discuss the rise & fall of these 20th C lens manufacturers.

Ian

[Jac@stafford.net]

Were Liddell's in Hanover Square ? My Grandmother loved photography, she bought prints on her honeymoon made in the Lake Disrict over 100 years ago, but it's forgotten that Scotland was pre-eminent in early photography and also other fields.

There were several Liddells in the area who were opticians, bubble level makers and engravers. Of course, Mr. Tribe described him well here: http://www.largeformatphotography.info/forum/showthread.php?102467-A-wee-early-Scottish-Petzval

[russyoung]

I've been mulling this over ... except for the 1854 reference in my dissertation, I wasn't able to locate any references to soft or diffused aesthetics before 1862. Especially if you have ever examined a daguerreotype with a 10X hand lens, you must appreciate how sharp a lens could be in say, 1845. In the years I lived in Scotland, I believe I examined every known calotype either as an original or a high-res scan. There were many images less than sharp but the reasons were not the taking lens. If you want to have a look at a number of Scottish-held calotypes, try: http://digital.nls.uk/pencilsoflight/resources.htm

My lens collection includes daguerrian lenses and others of the pre-1860 era. Perhaps one-third had lens elements which were reversed or interchanged and performed very poorly (if they formed an image at all) until the elements were installed correctly. Could this have happened here, Steven?

Russ

[tgtaylor]

Here's an interesting quote by Alvin Langdon Coburn, an internationally renowned Pictoralists of the late 19th early 20th crntury:

"My only concession to the taste of the time was the use of a soft-focus lens, made especially for me by my friend Henry Smith of Boston." -Alvin Langdon Coburn Photographer, Faber & Faber, 1966.

Thomas

[Steven Tribe]

Thanks for the link Russ! I'll work through them this weekend.

There can be no doubt that the cells are in the right place - they have quite different diameters. Larger front -ve and smaller rear +ve. This seems to me to be a logical construction to maintain a reasonable speed for the combination.
The lens mount cells are very different from anything I have ever seen before. The lens retaining rings are steel/iron threads, well made - nothing like the thin threaded rings used later in the century -with some notches to help screwing. The reason why I first assumed this must be a Petzval was because I could see a dark shadow on the seller's photos between the outside facing lens at the rear and the edge of the brass lens cell (lost central spacer or missing rear lens?). It turned out there was a perfect black enamel "brass" spacer between the lens and the cell body. The cells look as though they have never been opened.

[tgtaylor]

Here's an interesting quote by Alvin Langdon Coburn, an internationally renowned Pictoralists of the late 19th early 20th crntury:

"My only concession to the taste of the time was the use of a soft-focus lens, made especially for me by my friend Henry Smith of Boston." -Alvin Langdon Coburn Photographer, Faber & Faber, 1966.

Thomas

Update:

Pinkham & Smith were opticians in Boston,
Massachusetts whose primary business was dispensing eyeglass prescriptions as
well as making lenses for binoculars and telescopes. They had an interest in
photography and gradually grew to have a store location on Bromfield Street,
Boston's camera store street, which sold a full line of photographic supplies.
In 1901 photographer F. Holland Day brought to Henry Smith a soft-focus lens
made by Dallmeyer which he had brought back from a trip to Europe and asked if
he could duplicate the lens. While Mr. Smith didn't duplicate the lens he did
create his own formula for a new soft-focus lens which was new for an American
lens manufacturer. Smith and Walter Wolfe, another Pinkham & Smith employee,
would go on to produce several different styles of soft-focus lenses which
would become the favorites of most of the U.S. pictorial photographers through
the teens. Their "Visual Quality" lens is generally regarded as being their
best (it has the least amount of diffusion) and was made from the late teens
through the 1920's. Long story shorter (sorry!) Frank Peckman did his own fair
amount of research into the defunct Pinkham & Smith Company and located the son
of former company owner William F. Pinkham. He convinced the son that there
was a legion of photographers who admired his father's legendary lenses and
that they should manufacture a limited edition lens based on the original lens
formula since it was becoming increasingly difficult to locate the original
lenses. Pinkham's son was living in Lexington, Massachusetts which is why that
is the city engraved on the lenses. They chose the most popular lens size for
the time, the 14 inch (f4.5) which covers 8x10 and fits the large studio
cameras. I haven't been able to find who did the actual lens manufacturing.
Though based on the "Visual Quality" the "Bi-Quality" does not appear to have
the hand-ground lenses of the original. The aperture appears to be most
similar to the aperture used by Kodak for their own soft-focus lenses. I have
compared image quality between the two lenses ("Bi-Quality" and "Visual
Quality") and they are very similar, which is BEAUTIFUL! Since the vintage
lenses were hand-ground I have noticed that image quality actually varies with
each individual vintage lens--akin to a hand-made musical instrument having its
own distinctive voice. Some lenses have a greater or lesser degree of softness ...

Thomas

[tgtaylor]

Forgot to mention that F. Holland Day was coburn's uncle and mentor.

Thomas