Cookin' with Cooke! Please Post u'r Cooke Portrait lens shots

[Mark Sawyer]

In my not so big experience, there can't be a total sharp point, because of the different focal planes of the SF lens. "Less confusion" is a fine description...

With apologies for subverting the Cooke thread, describing soft lenses and how they work kinda gets into semantics. All pathways through the lens are producing sharp images, but they're on different focal planes. The outside areas of the lens are on a focal plane closer to the lens, getting progressively farther away as you approach the center.

Otherwise, the not-so-clear definated sharpness ( but sharpness) goes deeper then the DOF of normal lenses, so in my opinion, you can choose "this point or that point" and for me, the second part of the sentence, "obtaining the exact effect desired" is the most important one.

On a side note, soft lenses were first produced not to get a pictorial effect, but to get a deeper depth of field, done by spreading the focal plane. It was a bit later that photographers began to use the softness that produced as an effect.

So my way is first focusing and choosing the degree of softness, or choosing softness first and than focusing, it is not so important to me.
The main thing to me is the last step - a combination of refocusing and mainly looking for the best affect by stretching the bellows.
A total view of the GG image seems to give a be better impression of the effects than a small view via glasses or Lupe.

Yes, one must always refocus, but especially so with dial-in-the-softness lenses. As you change the spacing between the elements to adjust the softness, you also change the focal length slightly, but enough to throw the whole image out-of-focus, in spite of the spread depth of field. I suspect this, coupled with faulty instructions to "focus, then dial in the softness" has led to a lot of confusion about the difference between soft focus and out-of-focus as photographers using that method got simply out-of-focus images.

I'll shut up now...

[Colin D]

Thanks Tim, useful to know as I'm close to getting the Cooke in action.

[Tin Can]

Mark, please do not shut up.

I need all the online help I can find!

[richardman]

.. I am severely myopic and never see the big picture nor details unless I use loupe or put my bare eye right at GG. ...

Oy, most people use the word figuratively, but you use it literally! (Then again, apparently now one of the "big" dictionaries also allows literally to mean figuratively. As they say, I can't even.)

[richardman]

This is why I like the Cooke PS945 or the old Cooke triplets. The diffusion disk images just look fussy to me, whereas the Cooke are different. Thanks for explaining.

[richardman]

I meant fuzzy, not fussy ;-P

[Jim Galli]

I meant fuzzy, not fussy ;-P

Same thing.

[Mark Sawyer]

What about frumpy?

[Mattk]

Cooke 13.1" Series II and some seriously outdated polariod film. Looking forward to some 8x10 when work gets out of the way.[