Soft Focus ~ a little meniscus lens

I would like to recount a short tale of stumbling on a potentially interesting soft focus lens solution.  Before I tell the story, however, it might good to show a list of old lenses in this style, to set the foundation for all this Soft Focus Madness, as it were.

In the 19th and into the 20th centuries lenses made for Pictorialists were on offer.  Many of these were designed with soft image qualities when shot wide open and to sharpen things up as the aperture was stopped down.  

Browsing the Clarence White edited journal "Pictorial Photography in America" from 1920 thru 1922 reveals an interesting list of options (take a look toward the back of the journals in the advertising section) -

• Aldis f/3 and f/4.5
• Goerz Portrait Hypar
  
• Pinkham and Smith -
  
• "Synthetic" for landscape
• "Visual Quality" for portraiture
• "Wolf Artistic" slip-on diffusion lens
• Spencer Portland Pictorial
  
• Struss Pictorial
• Turner Reich Hyperion Diffusion Portrait f/4
• Wollensak Verito f/4
  

Even after the fall from grace of the Pictorialist style, lens manufactures continued to design and sell soft focus lenses.  I suspect they were made primarily for the Japanese market, but I have no definitive evidence of this.  

Here is a list of some of the post-Pictorialist soft focus lenses that were available for large format film systems.  Many came mounted in modern shutters such as Copal and Compur rendering them thoroughly usable for modern film photography.

• Cooke PS945 9inch/229mm f/4.5
  
• Fuji Fujinon 180mm f/5.6 SF with strainers
• Fuji Fujinon 250mm f/5.6 SF with strainers
• Rodenstock Imagon series with strainers
• 120mm
• 150mm
• 170mm
• 200mm
• 250mm
• 300mm
• 360mm
• 480mm
  
• Yamasaki Congo 150mm f/5.6 SF
• Yamasaki Congo 200mm f/5.6 SF
  

In medium format film post-Pictorialist era soft focus lenses minimally we have -

• Fuji GX EBC Fujinon GX/GXM SF 190mm f/8 
• Mamiya 645 Mamiya-Sekor SF C 145mm f/4 
• Mamiya RB67 150mm f/4 C Variable Soft Focus 
• Mamiya RZ67 180mm f/4 D/L Variable Soft Focus 
• Pentax 67 SMC 120mm f/3.5

Interesting Note: I know I wrote this in a prior article, but it bears repeating verbatim.  In their guidance literature Kodak suggests pulling the focus on the subject to objects closest to the camera.  Kodak said there was no useful information produced by their Portrait lenses on things in front of the point of focus.  They suggest, too, letting the under-corrected spherical aberration and deep depth of field that comes with it keep things apparently in focus behind the nearest point focused on.  This is something to keep in mind when shooting any under-corrected spherical aberration behind the point of focus lens.

Since I no longer shoot film and have moved completely to digital with small sensors I've been interested in exploring what might be available for smaller formats.  In a prior article I wrote about the Pentax 85mm f/2.2 Soft.  It was designed and built to give an enormous amount of under-corrected spherical aberration behind the point of focus.

For me, working with the Pentax lens a little difficult.  I haven't found many subjects nor lighting situations that react well to the Pentax' over the top level of softness.  I looked for a less dramatic solution.

Before I could spend more money on exploring some of the old manual focus 35mm SLR soft focus option, a thought occurred to me that I could attempt to follow Jim Galli's example and disassemble a few lenses and try different lens element combinations.

Jim is well known in America's large format film community for his work with soft focus lenses.  Until very recently he had a website filled with images that illustrated soft focus optical effects from Pictorialist Era lenses.  And he didn't stop there.  One of the last posts I read of his talked about how he disassembled an old Schneider Symmar and used one of the lens elements to make photos.  The results were compelling.  Unfortunately his website appears to be off-line.  I can't reach it any longer from Europe.

Digging through my own box full of cast-off, cast-away lenses I choose a classic Plasmat design 6 element 4 group 50mm lens.  These are as common as dirt.  Everyone who was anyone manufactured their own versions of the original "Nifty-Fifty" (as Current Cool Cats like to refer to them as) for perhaps every 35mm SLR ever made.

Just to see what might happen, I firmly grasped the poor old lens and unscrewed the front element set, fettled a correct distance to the sensor plane by adding a few short extension tubes, adapted it to a Sony A7, et voila! a behind the aperture three element two group "meniscus lens."  And it works!!  Have a look.

 

 

Classic Pictorialist lens image properties are clearly on display.  Images are soft around subject/object edges wide open.  There is increasing sharpness across the scene as the aperture is stopped down.  Using the aperture in this way I can control the amount of overall softness of an image.  

To me, this lens begins to strike a decent balance between the level of softness the lens adds and underlying image sharpness.  I find it crazy that I was able to hit upon this solution straight away at my first attempt.  It was almost too easy.  

Instantly, there is another viable optic for being able to re-create the early Pictorialist image qualities using more current small format tools.