Originally Posted by
bernice loui
vast majority of the lenses mentioned (verito, cooke portrait lenses, heliars, pinkham smith, kodak portrait, spencer portland and ....) were made in focal lengths not specific to 8x10.
~lots of them were made in production not for 8x10. That said, imo these sort of focus lenses are best on film formats 5x7 and larger to produce contact prints. If projection printed, enlargement of no more than 2x.
These sorta-focus lenses where only part of the overall portrait making practice from that era. What is often forgotten or neglected with sorta-focus lenses, lighting, portrait sitter's pose, props, back ground and more.
Post camera often involved "retouching" of the negative to fix what was needed and deemed to make an acceptable portrait. This was one of the primary reasons why 8x10 was highly preferred by the portrait folks from that era. Once all that was done, contact prints were very common and often yielded the best results.
From the 8x10 portrait industry back then imo, grew the wide acceptance of that image ratio due to exposure to images with this ratio and familiarity with that image ratio.
To believe speciality or "interesting" lenses alone results in the image is no different than believing 8x10 results in the best image. Fact and reality is, there is a lot more than lens, image recording format size and all those commonly and easily obsessed over item that are mere tools and means in the expressive image making process.
Lighting, composition, form tonality and all those lesser discussed and far more subjective-intuitive-creative aspects of image making is often shoved to the side in favor of camera-lens-format size and all those hardware centric objects.
Bernice
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