Petzval lenses, Bigger is better

[eddie]

i just thought i would post a few pictures to torture a few souls.....:)

i just found these......well, i will leave that for another story.

anyhow, just to give you an idea how big they are the one on the far left is a dallmeyer 2a :p, huge in it's own right.

the voigtlander (3rd from left. short one with the cap) is serial number 46xx. according to dan here: http://antiquecameras.net/blog.html it was made about 1853. this is a 16 inch f4 (or slightly faster, i need to check) petzval.

the 2nd from the left is ab H Hermagis Petzval. this is a very early #84xx. the "H" was only used for a few years. this is an 18 inch f4.5 petzval that is easily used in landscape mode. notice the threads on the hood? an interesting rare model for sure.

the big one at the left rear is a 28 inch f5ish E Francais petzval lens.

and we all know those big cone lenses.......this is a 24 inch f4 model. very nice lens.

i will be adding threads talking about the various lenses and their attributes in the near future. (i am trying to create a blog....can someone help me with this?). i will include better photos and videos for your viewing pleasures.

thanks again.

eddie

964469644796448

[SergeiR]

Eddie - what kind of help you need with blog?

[Amedeus]

Pure torture indeed ... ;)

[goamules]

24 inch Cone Centralizateurs make really nice baby bathtubs too. That's what I use mine for. You just remove the front element and configure it in "Paysage" mode (which means "bathtub" I if I remember correctly). Fill with water, and you can wash babies, dishes, whatever in the cavity!

[Scott Davis]

For starting a blog, my recommendation would be to sign up with one of the blog services like Wordpress or Blogspot. They provide the hosting, the technical stuff, and even a wide range of styling themes for your blog, mostly for free (depending on what you want to post, and how much you want to post... if you want to post video, for example, Wordpress will charge you $100/year). I use Wordpress for my blog and have been very happy with it. They make it easy to cross-publicize your blog on Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin, among other social media. Different blog hosts have different features, so I'd look into a range of options (Wordpress, Blogspot, Tumblr are the three that spring to mind most immediately). They also have more advanced options available if you're tech savvy and want to truly customize it or host your own.

[Steven Tribe]

Nice Hermagis Convertible. Just a twist and "presto" no need to remove the hood for the landscape meniscus function.
Some of these are pre-Waterhouse stop era - so look for signs of adaption.

[eddie]

For starting a blog, my recommendation would be to sign up with one of the blog services like Wordpress or Blogspot. They provide the hosting, the technical stuff, and even a wide range of styling themes for your blog, mostly for free (depending on what you want to post, and how much you want to post... if you want to post video, for example, Wordpress will charge you $100/year). I use Wordpress for my blog and have been very happy with it. They make it easy to cross-publicize your blog on Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin, among other social media. Different blog hosts have different features, so I'd look into a range of options (Wordpress, Blogspot, Tumblr are the three that spring to mind most immediately). They also have more advanced options available if you're tech savvy and want to truly customize it or host your own.

thanks scott. i would love to have videos too. my problem is how to link it to my eddiegunks.com page....if i even have to....

eddie

[CCHarrison]

eddie,

From someone who has posted a blog for 2 years now and averaged 65 posts per year and has put in countless hours, it aint easy and you will have few followers unless you committ to rich and frequent posts...

Why not be a guest blogger for me :)

Dan

[Scott Davis]

thanks scott. i would love to have videos too. my problem is how to link it to my eddiegunks.com page....if i even have to....

eddie

Well, you can have Wordpress take over the domain for eddiegunks.com and replace the pages of your site with pages on the Wordpress blog, then it would all be consolidated in one place... or it might be possible to set up an RSS feed on eddiegunks.com and have it subscribe to your blog. Many ways to skin that cat.

[Joe Forks]

Those lenses would be even bigger if they were in Texas! ha!

[Struan Gray]

I have Wordpress installed under my own domain. Dead easy - the only hard part was choosing/modifying the graphic theme.

Dan is right about the work: if you want a conventional blog you need to keep it current, chatty and up-to-date (even if it's about 150 year old lenses). My blog isn't like that. It's more of an essay collection with a *very* spotty publication schedule. Using blogging software still makes sense though because it automates a lot of the tedious admin, and the search engines (for now) crawl all over blogs in ways that they don't for static pages of text and images. I get a lot of traffic to single blog posts drawn by the image titles and captions.

Integrating a Wordpress blog with your regular site is as easy as adding a few links - there are standard ways of doing this in most Wordpress themes. If you use Wordpress' servers, which is easier, you will need to make sure that things like hotlink protection on your main web server is set correctly if you want to inline images from your site. Not a biggie.

[eddie]

thanks guys.

i do not really care if i get chatty interaction etc etc. basically i want them to come up in search engines. i want people who are looking for info about various lenses etc etc to have my stuff pop up so they can fine the info.

i got like 5000+ images of various antique lenses and info for them. i would like to be able to get that info out and searchable......under MY name....:) so people can find me if they need more info etc etc.

thanks

eddie

[Struan Gray]

With a blog you get a structure of categories and tags for free, and a mechanism for sorting them. A viewer who came to a specific, say, Hermagis lens via a Google image search would easily be able to find lists of your other Hermagis posts, or Petzval posts, or whatever. Assuming of course that you create and use the category/tag structure with logic and common sense.

I've ended up on the first pages in Google image searches for several of the artists I have featured as illustrations in my blog, despite not having many (any) incoming links for them. These are not minor artists either: they include Paul and John Nash, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh. There is much better information about these artists out there from an art perspective, so I can only assume that something I have done tickles the fancy of the current Google algorithm.

As far as I can make out, the secret trick is 1) use good source images of a reasonable size (not excessive, but not thumbnail either). 2) Write descriptive captions, in my case with links to and citation of the source. 3) Surround the pictures with text, real text not lists or boilerplate. All three should be easy for you.

[Struan Gray]

PS: I meant to say that the downside of a blog is that things can get lost once they have dropped off the bottom of the first page. Categories can help, but it can also be worth creating static manual pages with an index or greatest hits list. These can be linked from the blog, or elsewhere.

[Joe Forks]

PS: I meant to say that the downside of a blog is that things can get lost once they have dropped off the bottom of the first page. Categories can help, but it can also be worth creating static manual pages with an index or greatest hits list. These can be linked from the blog, or elsewhere.

I agree, and make sure you have well written meta tags. If you do that you are almost guaranteed decent positioning on search results considering the nature of the subject.

[Leszek Vogt]

I think that image-examples from these lenses would help, as well. Though that could be v. time consuming and economically all that viable. True, I often see really cool lenses, but one starts to wonder....what sort bokeh is this capable of, bla bla ?

Les

[eddie]

PS: I meant to say that the downside of a blog is that things can get lost once they have dropped off the bottom of the first page. Categories can help, but it can also be worth creating static manual pages with an index or greatest hits list. These can be linked from the blog, or elsewhere.

thanks. good point. that is one of my concerns. i want people to be able to easily find the info or more info once they arrive at the blog. thanks for the tips.

eddie