There are two ways to go about it. One is to find common lens designs that offer a significantly different pattern of sharpness than the best modern lenses. The other way is to employ soft-focus lenses that deliberately induce aberrations in order to achieve a layering of focus and that sometimes induce a soft glowing halo. It sounds like you would like the former. That's good, because soft-focus lenses are about five times more expensive than ordinary lens designs. Consider three lens designs that each have a unique property to offer. First is the Petzval. This was a real breakthrough in 1839. It offered the first fast wide-open lens with a workable zone of sharpness for portraits. with the petzval, only the center 20 degrees of the lens is sharp and it has a curved field. It is tricky to use because most people are accustomed to focusing along a plane that is parallel with the lens. Outside of the zone of sharpness, the Petzval offers a charming soft cottony blur with no distracting lines or artifacts. The Rapid Rectilinear or Aplanat (Wollensak Versar or Voltas). This lens, developed in 1860 was a big improvement over the petzval for landscapes. It offered a mid-range speed f6-f8 while having a much wider 40 degree zone of sharpness and a fairly flat field of focus. The rectilinear lens offers sharp focus when constructed by good lensmakers (Wollensak, Suter, Voigtlander etc..) and a kind of brown-sugar rendering of out-of-focus areas, a soft pleasing granularity. They are under appreciated as portrait lenses. The third lens design is the Tessar. It was invented around 1900 and it offered both fast speed and a wide field of sharpness. If you look at good landscape photographs from the first three-four decades of the twentieth century they were probably made with a tessar. The big advantage of a Tessar over a modern lens is a pleasingly uncomplicated out-of-focus look, a fairly soft granularity. They are also quite easy to obtain.
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