Lenses ~ finally found one

I swore I'd never ever own another Carl Zeiss Jena Tessar 50mm f/2.8 (nor a f/3.5 for that matter).  

In my hands they've never ever been any good.  Terrible wide open.  Maybe OK if you squinted hard at f/11.  Edges never cleaned up.  

After struggling with the famous name optic I wiped the thought of ever trying to own another one from my mind and moved on.

 

 

Sony A7RII, Carl Zeiss Jena Tessar 50mm f/2.8 

Went to a swap meet recently and tried to sell a few of unloved/unused lenses.  Met a little success, but not to the degree I was hoping for.

Stumbled around and looked at everything I could.  Had everything I wanted or could find.  Did as many deals as I could.

Being human can be "interesting."  Bright shiny objects attract, right?  And here I was thinking/hoping I was immune. 

 

Sony A7RII, Carl Zeiss Jena Tessar 50mm f/2.8  

Casually looking through a milk crate of m42 lenses my eye was drawn to a bright shiny object.  *natch*hooked*  The front cap was made of beautifully machined aluminum.  The rear cap was beautifully machined from, well, more aluminum.  The lens barrel was, oh yes, machined from beautiful aluminum.  The knurled focusing ring was honed from beautiful aluminum. 

Instant lust swamped my being.  I had to have it.  Whatever it was.

Taking the front cap off I saw it was a Zeiss Jena 50mm f/2.8.  Removing the rear cap I confirmed it was indeed m42.  Lenses were clean and clear.  So...

OK.  How much is this?  It didn't matter. It was going home with me.  Here's my wallet.  Take whatever you need.

Swapped a Ricoh 55mm f/2.2 Pentax K mount for it and a couple Euros and the deal was done.

 

Sony A7RII, Carl Zeiss Jena Tessar 50mm f/2.8  

As the endorphin rush subsided and my emotional chemistry returned to near normal I remembered: These lenses are horrible.  I've owned far too many of them and know this as deeply as anything I've ever known.  Just awful.  Even with a famous name engraved around the front ring.

Ugh.  Would I ever learn???  I could always use it as a paper weight.  My mother collected them.  Maybe it was in my blood.  Paper weights.

To confirm how horrible it was I put it through it's paces.

f/2.8 Center is... hmmm... wot's all this then?  This one is sharp in the center wide open.  Never saw that before.  Seriously.  Cheap supposedly worse Meyer Domiplan triplets were _always_ better than any Zeiss tessar I tried. Edges, not so much, as expected of early tessar... forgivable perhaps... and... again... not nearly as bad as the dozen or so others that've passed my way.

f/4 Field of sharpness expands from the center but doesn't yet cover the field in Glorious Sharpness on Full Frame. Still, impressive.  Maybe this could be the Sweet Aperture for portraiture? where edges typically go soft in the Old Style.

f/5.6 Huh.  Not 1/2 bad across most of the field, though, actually, the edges are still a touch soft.  Eminently usable. Eminently.

f/8  Holy Flipp'n Moly dear Molly.  So _this_ is why people talk about Zeiss Tessar so lovingly.  This looks like an nicely corrected modern lens.  OK, then.  Early 1950's traditionally designed optics can still do it.  Glorious Sharpness with a sense of depth and heft.

f/11 As good as anything in the Toy Box.  Still ever more Glorious Sharpness with a sense of depth and heft and... and... OK... I'll stop now...

Found a keeper.  Finally.  When I least expected it.  Why did this take so long?  Oh well.  There's no use asking questions with no answer to.  

Did I mention the lens comes with a many bladed aperture?

 

 

Sony A7RII, Carl Zeiss Jena Tessar 50mm f/2.8  

---------- Resources ------------

Does the tessar layout predate Zeiss' patent by 1/2 a century? 

Notes on the Carl Zeiss Jena Tessar

Notes on the humble tessar - with design suggestions  

Lenses ~ adapting m39 Paxette

As a placeholder to a longer conversation...

Leica Thread Mount lenses (m39 LTM) ~

• m39 - 39mm diameter by 1mm thread
• FFD of 28.8mm precisely

Paxette lenses ~ 

• m39 - 39mm diameter by 1mm thread - same as LTM
• FFD of 44mm  - which means Paxette will NOT work natively on LTM adapters, event though the threads are the same

 

 Sony A7RII, Staeble Choro 38mm f/3.5
Tiny little lens, plenty sharp stopped down

So the question arises of how to adapt m39 Paxette to digital mirrorless?  Here are three solutions.

Modify m42 adapter ~

As previously noted, the ffd of Paxette is 44mm.  m42 has a ffd of 45.46mm precisely.  Using this knowledge, here is one solution for adapting Paxette lenses.

• m42 adapter
• Remove the front m42 ring 
• Remove 1.5mm off the rear surface of the ring (machine or sandpaper grind)
• Reinstall the ring into the adapter 
• One each m39 to m42 ring for as many Paxette lenses as are on hand
• Mount m39 to m42 stepup ring on the Paxette lens
• Mount the lens on the m42 adapter 
• Mount m42 adapter on camera
• Take photographs 

The downside of this is one is limited to focusing distances as set by the lens. 

m39 to m39 extension tube on LTM adapter ~ 

Another approach requires a specialty extension tube.  Here's that solution.

• m39 Leica Thread Mount (LTM) adapter
• 14mm m39 to m39 extension tube 
• One each m39 to m42 ring for as many Paxette lenses as are on hand
• Mount m39 to m42 stepup ring on the Paxette lens
• Mount the lens on the m39 extension tube
• Mount extension tube on LTM adapter 
• Mount LTM adapter on camera
• Take photographs 

The downsides of this is one is limited to focusing distances as set by the lens, and the precise extension of 14mm is difficult to find.  I know of two possible suppliers but I'm not sure the part is always in stock. 

Adapt a m42 close focusing helicoid ~

A third approach is proving to be rather flexible. 

• m42 close focus 17mm-33mm helicoid adapter
• One each m39 to m42 ring for as many Paxette lenses as are on hand
• Mount m39 to m42 stepup ring on Paxette lens
• Mount the lens on the m42 helicoid 
• Mount helicoid on camera
• Take photographs 

Simple.  Direct.  Inexpensive. Flexible.

Using a helicoid allows for flexible focusing.  There's no need to measure the adapters for infinity.  Just turn the adapter threw to find the focus point.  And the lenses own focusing ring is still available for use as well.  Lastly, because everything remains m42, this approach is good for Pentacon/Pentax mount lenses and even provides a bit of close focusing capability.

  

 

Sony A7RII, Staeble Telon 85mm f/5.6
Smallest 85mm I've ever seen, plenty sharp 

Why all the Monkey Motion?  

There are more than a few tasty German optics with many aperture blades (think: beautiful out of focus rendition at all apertures) to be found in the Paxette family lens tree.

• Carl Zeiss - 50mm tessar 
• Enna - reportedly excellent, though I've yet to try them
• ISCO - nice, simple optics from a Jos Schneider division
• Roeschlein - I'd not heard of this company until recently
• Schacht - decent contrast and resolution selection of lenses
• Staeble - another decently sharp/contasty selection of lenses
• Steinheil - my current favorite for in-camera soft focus/pictorialist-like work

 

 

Sony A7RII, Steinheil Cassarit 45mm f/2.8
Tiny little lens, pictorialist effects at all apertures
with underlying "sharpness" that'll cut the
paper it's printed on

------------ References ---------------

Lists of Paxette lenses - incomplete

Fitting a m42 adapter for Paxette use 

Lenses ~ another whack at software intervention

On lens "corrections" -

While researching a lens I was interested in I stumbled across a comment that struck me.  It went something like (yes, I'm paraphrasing in the following)...

 "... you can use software to sharpen up this old lens, but you won't have a true understanding of how bad this lens really is..."

I wondered if the writer understood something fundamental to digital photography and current image processing. Software "corrects" for all manner of lens design and implementation "faults."

To see what I mean turn off software intervention.  Specifically, turn off -

• Capture Sharpen - which ostensibly counters AA filter effects
• Lens Correction Profile (LCP)  - which corrects for
• Chromatic Aberration
• Field Distortion 

For in-camera jpgs this means locating and changing the settings there on the camera.  For RAW this means locating these settings in the image processing software, where switches and controls could be very well hidden.

Now have a close look at an image and compare it against a software "corrected" image of the identical scene.

It can take a lot of image processing  just to reach a decent starting point.  What's good for the goose might be good for the gander, right?

Question: Why not apply software "corrections" to old manual focus lenses?

 

 

Sony NEX05T + Sigma 24mm f/3.5 DG DN
Illustrating the results of
all the software interventions applied
by default on file import into a RAW
image processing software 

On Lens Diffraction limits ~ 

Who hasn't read lens reviews that tell us things get mushy when shooting at apertures below the limits of what a sensor can resolve?  The phrase "diffraction limits" comes up shockingly often.

For full frame cameras 12 to 24mpixel that's f/16 and for 40 to 60mpixel that's f/11.  The caution is to avoid those apertures if you want the sharpest rendition possible.  The implication being that images shot at apertures below the resolution limits of a sensor are <insert favorite unsavory expletive>.

In light of software intervention capabilities, I wondered if this was strictly true.

Taking the question seriously, I used a beautiful old Nikon Nikkor 20mm f/3.5 Ai lens, focused two feet, adapted to a 42mpixel Sony A7RII (shooting RAW) and shot three photos starting at f/11, then f/16 and finally at f/22.

Looking at the images with Capture Sharpened turned off I could see a slight difference in the sense of sharpness between f/11 and f/22.  Between f/11 and f/16 it was a little more difficult to tell a difference at full rez or 200 percent rez.

Then I turned Capture Sharpen on and... <drum roll, please>... I see zero sharpness difference between them.  As in, it don't matter (bad English intended).  Software did what it was designed to do: Make things sharp.  OK.  OK.  There was, however, a clear difference in depth of field.  But that's also the point of shooting at small apertures, right?  

To check if this was strictly true I then took a fine little Pentax-M 28mm f/2.8 and reran the f/11, f/16, f/22 comparison.  In this case the sharpness difference between f/11 and f/22 was more obvious, even when using Capture Sharpen.  Because of the way the Nikkor performed, there's likely something in the Pentax-M design that adds a bit more softness at really small apertures.  However...

... for grins, I took the Capture Sharpened f/22 Pentax-M image and applied a gentle UnSharp Mask (USM) and compared the result to a Capture Sharpened bitingly/critically/fabulously sharp f/11 image.  The result is... <another roll on the drum, please> ... zero, zip, nutt'n, nada difference between them.  Software intervention of the kind applied to digital lenses now applied to the wee-Pentax-M is able to make a f/22 image look as good as a Capture Sharpened f/11 shot.

Question: How many people avoid shooting at small apertures because they've been told something awful happens down there? 

Recap question: With the kinds of beneficial image improving software tools available to us, why not use them, regardless of the lens? 

Lenses ~ Steinheil

I wanted to write a little about what I'm experiencing using lenses from a former German manufacturer.  C. A. Steinheil Söhne Optical and Astronomical Works, as they were first known, made early and significant contributions to lenses for photography.

 

Sony A7RII
Steinheil 45mm f/2.8 Cassarit at f/11 

A little history ~ 

In 1866 Carl August von Steinheil patented the Rectilinear four element two group symmetrical design lens.  He beat Dallmeyer by a week or two to the patent.  The importance of this early design can't be over-stated.  Many subsequent designs descend from this idea.

There was also an early design for what would later by patented by Carl Zeiss as the tessar four element three group design.  Steinheil patented theirs in 1881, which was two decades before Zeiss.  Zeiss inverted the Steinheil optical layout and successfully claimed uniqueness of concept before the patent office.

Steinheil continued to develop lenses for photography through the 1960's.  They had Dagor/Protar designs. They offered their Antiplanet inverted tessar.  They developed Cooke triplets.  Many of these lenses are available for not much money on the used market these days.

Soft focus lens search ~ 

I've been looking for lenses that gently introduce optical imperfects into images made on miniature formats.  

Wollensak offered a Velostigmat Series II that allowed users to move the first/front element away from the second and third element and group.  Various focal lengths implemented this feature to be used on various large film formats  The lenses introduce soft focus effects that were sought after by Pictorialists and portraitists at the time.  I am looking for something similar for use on miniature formats.

I stumbled across a Japanese first element focuser, bought one, and found it does the trick, just like the Velostigmat Series II.  Then, a friend alerted me to the fact that certain German lenses from the 1950's and 1960's were also first element focusers.

In these I found the soft focus lenses for miniature formats that I was looking for. 

On vacation ~ 

This past winter we headed to Italy to escape the cold, gray, set skies of Paris, only to have those clouds and wet follow us.  No matter.  We needed to get away.  

I hauled a Sony A7RII with three lenses.  One of the lenses practically lived on the A7RII was a Steinheil 45mm f/2.8 Cassarit.  This is a unit focuser in a m39 Paxette mount (44mm FFD, not the more comment 28.8mm Leica Thread Mount spec).

This unit focusing 45mm Steinheil went along because I'd not correctly/fully cleaned a 50mm f/2.8 Auto-Cassaron Edixa my friend originally alerted me to.  I didn't think the 45mm would have much majick.  I was wrong.  These Steinheils they have a range of soft focus-ness that can be quite useful.

The soft focus images made around Napoli and Rome were made with the 45mm f/2.8 Cassarit unit-focuser. 

Designed differently ~

Steinheil unit and first element focusers seem to share a common trait.  They render very crisply with evident underlying sharpness.  They also exhibit an overlaying reduction in overall contrast and highlight bloom.

Characteristics of two soft focus candidates ~ 

• Ricoh 55mm f/2.2 
• four element four group
• First element focusing 
• ISCO Iscotar 50mm f/2.8 
• Cooke triplet 
• First element focusing
• Both lenses
• Soft wide open
• Good contrast from wide open
• Center sharpening up as aperture closes
• Edges struggling to sharpen up even as aperture closes
• Exposures normal ~ comparable to modern AF optics 
• Highlight bloom diminishes with aperture closure 

Characteristics of Steinheil soft focus candidates ~

• Sharp across from wide open
• Veiling softness at all apertures ~ diminishing slightly as aperture closes
• Tendency to feel over-exposed on Sony mirrorless ~ tonal distribution crowded to the high end of the curve
• Highlight bloom largely unaffected by aperture closure 

Note: I also have a 135mm f/4.5 Culminar 4 element 3 group tessar formula Steinheil lens.  It's not as sharp from wide open as the shorter focal length lenses listed above.  Stopping down does little to improve resolution.  However, there remains the underlying veiling and highlight glow of the two shorter focal length optics.  This is different than how a 135mm f/4.5 Staeble behaves.  The Staeble has good contrast from wide open, which improves with the closing of the aperture.  I'm beginning to think that soft image rendition is a Steinheil trait.  If anyone knows a Steinheil lens designer who wouldn't mind commenting, I'm all ears.

This underscores something I've come to appreciate.  That is, a photographic lens of the same optical layout designed by two different teams can and often do render differently.  Sometimes dramatically differently.

To me this means any majick found in lenses is not simply the result of the lens type (tessar, plasmat, triplet, Ernostar, Sonnar, etc).  Rather, differences in rendering are the result of the calculations and decisions made in details, such as lens curvatures, glass types, and element placement.

 

----------- Resources -------------

Steinheil lenses with design cross-sections 

Steinheil company history 

Lenses ~ thoughts on Viltrox 28mm f/4.5 FE

On a lark I purchased a ridiculously cheap Viltrox 28mm f/4.5 FE.

 

What I found can be summed up in the following two sections. 

Pros ~

• Very inexpensive (pleasantly low impact on the wine budget)
• Very small
• Very light
• Surprisingly sharp 
• Autofocus... sort of...
• Cute little built-in lens cover that is actuated by a small knob on the front of the lens that helps keep the pocket lint out of the optic 

Cons ~

• Fixed f/4.5 aperture
• Prone to flare in strongly off axis lit scenes 
• Slow/inconsistent startup  
• Dodgy AF 
• Works only on certain Sony cameras depending on firmware version (or so I'm told)
• Periodic AF startup failures on AF cameras 
• Periodic AF failures if camera left on too long
• Regular AF failures in lower (note: not yet low) light
• Firmware updates are an absolute disaster
• Some versions are available through a Viltrox app for cellphones
• Other/newer (?) updates are only available through Microsoft/Apple desktop computers.

Note 1: AF failures require a re-power start.  Failing that, I need to unmount/remount the lens.  Failing that, I need to drop the battery out and reinstall.  There must be something going on with the way the Viltrox is programmed and is trying to interact with the camera.

Note 2: Because I run Linux and the cellphone app appears limited to earlier firmware versions there is no way to update the firmware in my lens to see if AF performance has been improved in more recent versions. 

From this you can easily guess that this is a troublesome lenscap of a lens.  On the one hand it fits in my pocket when mounted on a small APS-C Sony E (in my case - A5000).  On the other, startup time and AF have proven to be a frustration.

None of this prevented me from taking it on holiday this past winter.  Only once did I put a Sigma 19mm EX DN on the A5000.  Everything else, litterally, was shot using this Lens of Frustration.  I suffered through it's faults to enjoy the portability aspects of the setup. 

Is sainthood granted for living under these (well, OK, self imposed) conditions?

There are a couple Flickr albums filled with images made in this way.  

See - Napoli and Rome

The sharp images in those albums are from the Viltrox 28mm.  The soft images are from an A7RII/Steinheil 45mm Cassarit setup I also took along for the adventure.

I wish the Viltrox 28mm f/4.5 FE were a more reliable optic.  It'd never leave one of my cameras if that were the case.  Alas... well... I still enjoy using it... and get to practice breathing slowly when the little lens starts acting goofy... which seems like every 3rd or 4th startup...

 

Lenses ~ short list of Soft Focus lenses from 1866 to 1945

Similar to my wondering about lens histories for sharp lenses, I wondered when soft focus came into being.

 

 

Sony A7RII + Steinheil 45mm f/2.8 Cassarit
Showing in-camera lens induced
soft focus effects are indeed
possible when shooting 
miniature formats 

It turns out, Dallmeyer did the job back in the mid-1800's.  This is a few decades before the start of the "pictorialist" movement.  Several things I've read suggested these Dallmeyers didn't sell all that well (Portrait nor Bergheim - are they in fact the same lens?  someone please correct me if I'm wrong) at first.  When the "pictorialist"s showed up the Bergheim was resurrected.

For me, that's not the most surprising thing.  Rather, it's the fact that an American company, Wollensak, offered a very broad range of soft focus lenses with introductions of new optical formulas spanning more than 20 years.  Then there's Kodak.  They put to market two Portrait lenses in the 1940's.  Which seems rather late to me.

The reason this surprised me is that for many years writers claimed that soft focus and "pictorialism" died during the First World War.  It turns out that they were wrong.  "Pictorialist" photography continued to be practiced well into the 1970's.  Well, it was in America, at least.

With the adoption of smaller formats (120 and 35mm) soft focus lenses continued to be introduced.  They were a "thing" on the Japanese "scene" with some of the product leaking out into other markets.  I've written about this at length in prior posts.  

For this entry I would simply like to put a few place-holders in history as way posts along the road of soft focus lens history. 

Keeping in mind:

• There were many many opticians who offered single element lenses that were adaptable to soft focus photography 
• Due to uncorrected optical aberrations there was a difference in points of focus between what was seen on the ground glass and which portion of the color spectrum the UV/blue/slight-green sensitive materials recorded 
• The Eidoscope being the first lens to allow accurate focus correspondence between the ground glass and light sensitive materials - sort of (see next comment)
• Soft Focus lenses achieve the effect in part by under-correcting for spherical aberration, which means there can be a broad range of possible focus points (depending on film sensitivity).  Several sources suggest when deploying for portraiture to focus on the nose and the to let the aberrations do what they do behind the point of focus. 

Brief list of dates and manufacturer for large format cameras: 

• 1866 ~ Dallmeyer Portrait
• 1868 ~ Dallmeyer Bergheim
• 1891 ~Hans Watzek Meniscus described
• 1890s ~ Dallmeyer Bergheim reissued
• 1903 ~ BOM Hermagis Ediscope corrected for ground glass focus

... and then something I very seriously underestimated: Wollensak

• 1903 ~ Wollensak Achromatic 
• 1906 ~ Wollensak Royal Portrait 
• 1906 ~ Wollensak Portrait Series A - less expensive than the Royal
• 1909 ~ Wollensak Vitax 
• 1911 ~ Wollensak Velostigmat Series II
• 1911 ~ Wollensak Verito - design borrowed from Bodine Pictorial lens
• 1912 ~ Wollensak Vesta - no diffusion adjustment
• 1926 ~ Wollensak Varium - Cooke Triplet giving gentle SF effects

... then...

• 1945 (approx) ~ Kodak Portrait 12inch and 14inch f/4.5

------------- Reference Materials ---------------

Rapid Rectilinear 

Optical design forms 

Soft focus ~ why 

Wollensak compendium 

Karl Struss Pictorialism 

Wiki on the Cooke triplet 

DPReview forum thread on lenses that preceded the tessar 

Tessar thoughts 

Tessar formula recalculations 

 

Lenses ~ short list of 1800's optical designs

Over the winter I wondered what the history of lens development for photography might look like.  While there are many many variations on the theme, I found a way through the Madness that made sense to me.

 

Keeping mind that optics were well known before photography, their adaptation to the photographic process is interesting.  It turns out, a certain Dr. Petzval played an important role.  It's so important, that in the 1902 Camera Club of Paris magazine they published the following description of the installation of a monument in the likeness of Dr. Petzval at the Imperial University in Vienna.

Translated from French -

"...  The series of festivities given by the Vienna Photographic Society concluded with the formal presentation of the Petzval monument to the Imperial University. This monument, modeled by Brenek and executed in marble, bears the following inscription:

DR. JOSEPH PETZVAL

PROFESSOR DER MATHEMATIK 1837-1877

geb. 1807; gest. 1891

gewidmet von der PHOTOGR. GESELLSCHAFT IN VIEN

In other words: To Joseph Petzval, Professor of Mathematics, born in 1807; died in 1891; dedicated by the Vienna Photographic Society

The monument depicts, in high relief, a remarkably expressive portrait of the great scholar. It is framed by a foliage-adorned border, and on the entablature, a laurel branch rests on a lens board. This detail recalls the portrait lens invented by Petzval, as noted in the document signed by Mr. Schipper, Rector of the University of Vienna, in which he declares his acceptance, on behalf of the Academic Senate, of the gift offered by the Photographic Society..."

Keeping in mind that:

• Dr. Petzval and Voigtländer had a business agreement until a falling out separated them
• Carl August von Steinheil was awarded a patent for his Rectalinear lens a week or two _before_ Dallmeyer ~ the designs/calculations appear to be strikingly similar
• Carl Zeiss was awarded a patent for their Tessar in spite of the fact that both Dr. Petzval and Steinheil had similar, though inverted, lenses decades before
• The Englishman Dennis Taylor worked from concepts (and wrote and spoke often about his approach), where the Germans preferred to work from calculations
• Germany in an Axis technology transfer to Japan before the outbreak of the Second World War shared their calculation approach to optical design, which now the adopted/accepted solution for making lenses today 

Here's a brief timeline that I've found useful for understand how photographic lenses came to be.

• 1840 - Voigtländer and Petzval - Portrait 4 elements 2 groups ~ *sharp resolution drop-off from center to edges
• 1857 - Petzval Orthoskop ~ 4 elements 3 groups ~ inverse of what later became tessar
• 1866 - Carl August von Steinheil preceeded Dallmeyer by a week or two - Rectalinear  4 elements 2 groups ~ *corrected the sharp drop-off of the original Petzval/Voigtländer Portrait 
• 1881 - Steinheil Antiplanet (Triplar, Culminar with examples made into the 1970's) ~ 4 elements 3 groups ~  inverse of what later became tessar
• 1890 - Rudolph Zeiss Protar ~ Anastigmat 4 elements 2 groups ~ similar to the earlier Rectilinear, though with different calculations and glasses
• 1892 - Emil von Hoegh - Goerz ~ Dagor 6 elements 2 groups 
• 1893 - Dennis Taylor ~ Cooke Triplet 3 elements 3 groups ~ outstanding corrections across the field
• 1893 - Steinheil Orthostigmat ~ Dagor-type 6 elements 2 groups 
• 1895 - Voigtländer Collinear ~ Dagor-type 6 elements 2 groups 
• 1900 - Hans Harting ~ Voigtlander Heliar 5 elements 3 groups Cooke derivative with cemented doublets on both ends of a symmetrical triplet layout
• 1903 - Zeiss Tessar ~ 4 elements 3 groups

Of course if a person digs just a bit deeper they'll find hundreds and hundreds of opticians who made photographic lenses and contributed to the development of optics for photography.  So the field of knowledge can get very muddy very quickly.  I stripped everything to just the simplest of skeletons.  Relevant details are left to the reader to explore.

To me, the important years would be 1840, 1866, and 1893.  Everything seems to descend from design advancements patented in those years.

------------- Reference Materials ---------------

Rapid Rectilinear 

Optical design forms 

Wiki on the Cooke triplet 

DPReview forum thread on lenses that preceded the tessar 

Tessar thoughts 

Tessar formula recalculations 

Chasing "softness" in small formats ~ troisieme part ~ Showing My Homework

I recently wrote a blog entry where I talked about lenses that seem to fill the gap between Full Blown Soft Focus for 35mm format and "normal" sharp/clinical lenses.  What I shared were mainly Lens Porn, er, sorry, Portraits illustrations because I find these cheap lenses beautiful to take photos of.  I did not share my homework, even though I wrote at length about differences between the optics.  This blog entry corrects this omission.

Keep in mind that the trick to these first element focusing lenses is that the greatest optical imperfection effect is generally found in subjects closer/closest to the camera.  Of course it depends on lens design, but this is the tendency I've seen thus far.

Often these first element focusing lenses for 35mm format that are easily adaptable to digital derive from or are implementations of the early Cooke Triplet.  The design is two positive elements on each end with one negative element in the middle.  This is pretty simple, easy to manufacture, and can be very low cost.  Lenses on the used market can be nearly Give Away cheap.  I recently picked up a digital adaptable first element focusing Cooke triplet design lens for less than 9Euro.

Homework ~

 

Steinheil Auto-Cassaron
50mm f/2.8 at f/4
processed using a film sim
that I like just to see how
the low contrast of the lens
might play out against a
contrast-inducing LUT

 

Comments ~ (borrowed in large part from an earlier blog post)

In reverse order, from bottom to top... 

Ricoh 55mm f/2.2 Riconar - Optical imperfections galore - the kinds of imperfections vary depending on subject distance.  While I don't show this here, it's easily seems comparing close to distance focused subject at f/2.2 and f/4.  It delivers rather decent contrast, actually.  

Interesting highlight "glow" effects.  Controllable by aperture and subject distance, which is potentially useful.  One would have to map out distance/aperture to know which settings to use.  

f/11 can make a pretty sharp image of distant subjects.  Regarding the effects I'm going after, between f/2.2 and f/5.6 the optical imperfections at all distances can play well toward generating a decent "Pictorialist" style enlarged to "normal" viewing size/distance.

ISOC Iscotar 50mm f/2.8 - Optical imperfects somewhere between the Ricoh and Steinheil.  Good contrast.  

Interesting highlight "glow" effects.  Controllable, as with the Ricoh, by aperture and subject distance.  f/8 and f/11 can make a decently sharp image at greater subject distances if desired.  

Between f/2.8 and f/5.6 the optical imperfections can play well toward generating a decent "Pictorialist" style enlarged to "normal" viewing size/distance.  I think of the ISCO as a slightly more rational German Riconar.

Steinheil Auto-Cassaron 50mm f/2.8 - Subtle optical imperfections, spherical aberration at all apertures and all subject distances. Low contrast.    Using the "haze" removal control during processing cleans up a scene, but why use it if I'm looking for "soft focus?"  Have I mentioned this is a low contrast lens?  There must be an echo in here.  Either that or it's strongly evident from looking at the results.

To me this lens is like using a Heliar large format lens from Voigtlander.  Back in the day I owned two of these, a 15cm and 21cm f/4.5, both in Compound shutter.  These lenses had similar underlying detail to what I see with the 50mm.  Missing the rendering of those old lenses I'm happy to discover the Steinheil.  The more I stare at Steinheil images the more I wonder if this isn't a basic trait to how Steinheil designed their optics?  As with the Heliars I find this a really interesting way to make an image.  There seems to me to be a lot of potential for processing unique small format digital images.  I have at least one more Steinheil optic coming to try to confirm/deny this line of thinking.

As the lens is stopped down the underlying detail begins to extend from the center toward the edges of the field.  The effect is common to how triplets behave and I saw this most particularly in a Meyer Domiplan 50mm I once had.  It was sharper from wide open than any Zeiss Tessar I ever saw (and I had more than a few of these over the years).  The ISCO behaves this way too.  That is, wide open the center of the field can be surprisingly sharp and the mid to edge of the field showing subtle/not-so-subtle optical defects of various kinds.  These clean up as the aperture is stopped down and the sharpness spreads out.

With my Auto-Cassaron it's as if the lens designers kept/allowed the spherical aberration to gain consistency in other areas of optical design.  Resolution, field distortion, chromatic aberration and coma are better controlled than in the Ricoh and ISCO.  While more subtle than many large format soft focus lenses from Back in the Day, the Steinheil for small format might make for a decent "Pictorialist" style lens where image viewing sizes can vary depending on the electronic display system. 

 

Images made with a Steinheil
Auto-Cassaron 50mm f/2.8 at f/2.8 or f/4 

Chasing "softness" in small formats ~ deuxieme part

I'm chasing pixies again.  Or still.  Or some little "corner case" like that.

The topic of soft focus photography on small formats is interesting to me.  I'd like to reliably replicate the "look" and "feel" of Photo Secessionist/Pictorialist era prints in digital.  This means looking for a way to get "just the right amount of softness" in an image using digital sensors.

 

Sony A7RII
Ricoh Riconar 55mm f/2.2 @f/2.8 

All of the made for purpose adaptable to digital 35mm SLR Soft Focus lenses I've looked give results that are too "strong."  That is, the level of veiling "softness" (spherical aberration) does not stand up to looking at an image at "normal" viewing distances.

I'm convinced that soft focus lenses from the late 1800's/early 1900's "work" because they were made by contact printing and lens designers could allow "just the right amount" of optical imperfections to be pleasing to viewers.  4x5 inch.  5x7 inch.  Whole plate.  8x10 inch.  Any attempt to enlarge a negative made with a special purpose soft focus lens meets with disaster.  So contact printing it was.  Period.

Adaptable 35mm/Full Frame Soft Focus lenses to my way of thinking fail where large format film lenses could succeed.  Fujifilm 85mm f/4 SF.  Pentax 85mm f/2.2 and f/2.8.  Minolta 85mm f/4 Varisoft.  Canon 135mm SF.  These lenses are nearly impossible to work with if trying to come close to what the original Pictorialists were able to create. 

Though, it must be said, I have it on good PhD thesis-level on this topic authority that Pictorialists in the 1970's and 1980's were able to successfully use the Minolta Varisoft with the softness ring set between "0" and "1" (ie: very very gentle application of spherical aberration).  The photographer had to know what they were doing.

Looking at pixies, odd pieces of fluff, and photographic lens histories I found that something potentially useful.   Wollensak's Velostigmat Series II tessar formula is a normally sharp lens that came with soft focus capability.  The soft focus effect is achieved by unscrewing the first element moving it away from the two optical groups placed on either side of the aperture.  By extending the distance between the first and second element a pleasing soft focus effect is achievable.

This got me to thinking. Perhaps pixies do exist, in spite of the lack of empirical evidence.

What if I took a cheap Soviet tessar and extended the distance between the first and second elements?  Would the soft focus effect seen in large format film photography be achievable in smaller formats?  Perhaps even in some controllable or easily understood manner?

Being occupied with the Rigors of Retirement, time passed and I casually let the subject rest.

One day I was thumbing through a Pentax on-line forum and discovered that the Ricoh 55mm f/2.2 Riconar is a first element focuser.  It's not a tessar, nor a Cooke triplet.  It's a four element air space design of some kind, of which I've never seen the likes of before.  So I thought I'd give it a try as they are nicely inexpensive.  What a strange and interesting lens the Ricoh turned out to be. 

I then learned the Germans made a LOT of Cooke triplet first element focusing lenses... because they were cheap... because they are easy to manufacture... and because they were (barely?) sufficient to the task.  The first element has, in concept, enough power to control but not contain many of the optical imperfections down stream.  

Enter a Steinheil Auto-Cassaron 50mm f/2.8 Cooke triplet.  Such a beautiful lens.  Oh my. My many thanks to Bonzo Din or turning me onto this one.

Enter an ISCO Iscotar 50mm f/2.8 Cooke triplet. Such a gorgeous lens.  Oh boy.

Avoiding the Meyer Domiplan 50mm f/2.8.  Been there.  Done that.  Soap bubble ain't my thang.  

Making a habit of avoiding cheap lenses all my life colored my sense of what is possible.  Cheap lenses are bad lenses, right?  The trick question is in which ways is a lens "bad?"  Mike Johnson from Darkroom Magazine/The Online Photographer said something to the effect that all lenses have their gifts.  And so it is with first element focusing triplets and quadruplets.  I've found they can provide a controllable sense of softness, particularly for subjects nearer to the camera than not.   There live the pixies I've been searching for.

 

Status: Here's what I've experienced using these lenses thus far.

Ricoh 55mm f/2.2 Riconar - Optical imperfections galore - the kinds of imperfections vary depending on subject distance. Decent contrast.  Interesting highlight "glow" effects.  Controllable by aperture and subject distance.  f/11 can make a fairly sharp image of distant subjects.  Between f/2.2 and f/5.6 the optical imperfections at all distances can play well toward generating a decent "Pictorialist" style enlarged to "normal" viewing size/distance.

 

Steinheil Auto-Cassaron 50mm f/2.8 - Subtle optical imperfections, spherical aberration at all apertures and all subject distances. Low contrast.    Using the "haze" removal control during processing cleans up a scene, but why use it if I'm looking for "soft focus?"  

This lens is like using a Heliar large format lens from Voigtlander.  Back in the day I owned two of these, a 15cm and 21cm f/4.5, both in Compound shutter.  These lenses had similar underlying detail to what I see with the 50mm.  Missing the rendering of those old lenses I'm happy to discover the Steinheil.

As the Auto-Cassaron is stopped down the underlying detail begins to extend toward the edges of the field.  The effect is really interesting to see.  It's as if the lens designers kept the spherical aberration to gain consistency in other areas of optical design, such as resolution, field distortion, chromatic aberration and coma.  The Steinheil obviously makes for a decent "Pictorialist" style lens for small formats, though of a different characteristics compared to the Ricoh. 

 

ISOC Iscotar 50mm f/2.8 - Optical imperfects somewhere between the Ricoh and Steinheil.  Good contrast.  Interesting highlight "glow" effects.  Controllable, as with the Ricoh, by aperture and subject distance.  f/8 and f/11 can make a decently sharp image at greater subject distances if needed.  Between f/2.8 and f/4.5 the optical imperfections can play well toward generating a decent "Pictorialist" style enlarged to "normal" viewing size/distance.  I think of the ISCO as a slightly more rational German Riconar.

 

 

Are there more German first element focusing triplets in my future?  Stay tuned.  

Digital Zone System ~ Sony A6300 in-camera jpg generation

I continue to pick at a question about where Sony places tone values for its in-camera jpg generated images.  My question this time is how manufacturer default settings record luminance.

In the Sony BIONZ and BIONZ X universe I've noted that Creative Style Black and White jpgs at its out of the box manufacturer default setting clips the shadow areas hard compared to sensor RAW.  The Creative Style BW range of tone expression is compressed into a narrow range.  It's a very steep curve into darkness.

It's this tonal compression that sent me in search of ways of expanding the in-camera generated Black and White jpg tonal range and found using DRO at specific values useful.  DRO2 or DRO3 raise the shadow values in a controlled way, though the bottom of the tonal range is still -5EV/Zone 0.  By comparison, RAW files using very early NEX reach pure black at -7EV and later sensors from A6000 onward reach pure black at -8EV or -9EV.

That's on the stills Creative Style side of the Sony systems I have.  

On the video side in the BIONZ X systems I have there are additional imaging functions under the heading of Picture Profile.  I originally thought these were an extension of Creative Style.  Only recently did it occur to me to confirm/deny this.

Et voila! here I am with ever more words and illustrations of what I've found. 

For this post I share the Sister of the Mother of All Digital Zone System Charts for a Sony A6300 that I have.  Illustrating the effects of parameter changes (contrast, knee, etc.) are not covered here.  That would be the Mother of All Digital Zone System Charts had I taken the time to do all that.  However, I feel a pretty clear understanding of Sony is doing can be developed.  Additional details and refinements are left to the reader to pursue.

As I leap off into the deep end of things I should note that the process used in all my Digital Zone System work is easily implemented on all non-Sony systems.  All this is simply noting how cameras place luminance values given the various imaging functions a manufacturer offers.  In fact, I've spot checked this entire approach against Panasonic Lumix S9 and Fuji GFX100RF systems and found the basis of understanding holds true across at least three manufacturers cameras.

Setup ~

• RAW processed 1EV separation values as reference
• In-camera generated 1EV separation jpgs for...
• Creative Style Black and White with settings at manufacturer default
• Picture Profiles selecting...
• Gamma
• Color Mode Black and White
• All other settings at manufacturer default for each Profile

Results ~

 

Comments ~

Looking at the result in columns from left to right...

RAW 0EV -  This is my tone value reference.  Though not shown here, -8EV is pure black.  1EV tone separation is achieved from -8EV to +2EV.  From +2EV to +4EV is the "shoulder" of the curve (ala film).  Film stopped being 1EV separated at -2EV, which explains why digital imaging systems offer a TON more shadow detail than film when 0EV (the standard) is set at Zone 5.

Creative Style Black and White - Pure black is -4EV Zone 1.  Pure white is +4EV.  Zones 4 through 1 show a steep drop in tone compared to the RAW reference.  Visually, images made using this setting are contrasty with what I would call "inky" blacks.

Sills - The first Picture Profile "style" I come to shows what appears to me to be a very similar result to Creative Style Black and White.

Movie - This Picture Profile is the first illustration I come to of Sony moving tonal values compared with Creative Style Black and White and Picture Profile Stills.  Notably, the shadow values are "opening up" with Zone 0 being properly pure black.  This setting behaves similarly to what Creative Style with DRO enabled can do.  If there was nothing further, at its default setting I feel Picture Profile Movie could be a satisfactory in-camera jpg imager. 

Cine 1 - Now we're cooking with gas.  Tonal values are expressed through EV -6 Zone -1, though the highlights are a little "hot" with how close +3EV is to pure white.  To correct for the highlights being "hot", under-exposing by -0.3EV moves the entire curve appropriately (to more closely match the Zone System definition).  For the way I was trained to "see" BW images from all the way back into the Film Days I could stop right here.  

A very useful BW Sony recipe:

• Picture Profile Gamma Cine 1
• Color Mode Black and White
• -0.3EV
• All other Picture Profile Cine 1 settings factory defaults

Cine 2 - Wackiness ensues.  Highlights are strongly compressed.  Perhaps if someone is "color grading" video, having tone value in the highlights could be interesting.  For BW stills work?  I'm not so sure.  YMWV.

Cine 3 - Hah!  Another potentially useful manufacture default Picture Profile.  This is very similar to Cine 1, except for the exposure as the tones are expressed.  There's no need to -0.3EV with this setting.  It seems usable straight out of the box: 

• Picture Profile Gamma Cine 3
• Color Mode Black and White
• All other Picture Profile Cine 1 settings factory defaults

Cine 4 - This Picture Profile setting sets -5EV as pure black, where Cine 1 and Cine 3 set pure black at -6EV.  Said another way, Cine 4 appears to be using less of the native dynamic range of the sensor that Cine 1 and 3.  Depending on the environment a person shoots in, this could be sufficient as an out of the box Color Mode BW setting.

SLog 2 - All Holy Hell breaks loose and the FULL dynamic range of the sensor is expressed. +4EV down through -8EV have tone.  Images using SLog 2 "look" flat.  Referencing back to how my eyes were trained on film prints, SLog 2 "feels un-natural."  It's a strange sensation.

Of course SLog 2 is meant for video work and the output of this setting is expected to be color graded after the fact.  That's where the Cool Kids get to apply their oh so special color LUTs to achieve certain "cinematic effects."

For BW stills work I envision this setting being useful in extremely high contrast situations, then off-loading a jpg from the camera to a mobile device for processing where an 8bit color space is all that's available.  Otherwise we'd just shot RAW and process it in a 16 or 32 bit color space, right? 

SLog 3 - Ack!  Here we go again with crushed highlights.  I see zero value in this setting for BW stills work. 

Chasing "softness" in small formats...

I was rather excited when stumbling upon the Ricoh Riconar 55mm f/2.2.  It's a soft focus lens in cheap kit lens drag and I thought I'd skinned a Fat Calf.  

I've been looking for a lens with gentle optical incorrections.  The made to purpose "soft focus" lenses for Minolta, Pentax, Canon, Leica, etc, etc, etc, are all way too soft for me.  The effect doesn't whisper it's presence, it hits me over the head with a hammer and announces "I am a Soft Fekk'n Focus Lens, fer Gawds! sake!!"  The Ricoh, on the other hand, appears to offer a controllable level of softness, much like early large format portrait and pictorialist lenses.

 

 

 

Having struck gold once, the experience motivated me to look for other old first optical element/group focusing lenses for 35mm format cameras.

Bonzo Din shared the fact the a German made Steinheil comes with a front element focusing lens.  It's called the Steinheil 50mm f/2.8 Auto-Cassaron.  Oh boy! quick as a bunny I found and purchased one.  The aperture and focusing ring were sticky, so I disassembled the simple lens as far as I could, applied denatured ETOH to everything trying to unbind the bound bits (kinky! you say).  Cleaned and lubed the focusing threads.  The Steinheil became usable.

 

 

 

What I found is The lens is an implementation of the classic Cooke triplet.  This Steinheil is indeed first element focusing.  The second and third elements are fixed, one on each side of the aperture.  The Steinheil's aperture control mechanism is as simple as can be.  Lens coatings are applied only to the outer surfaces front and back.  Surfaces on the inside of the lens are uncoated.   The lens is obviously designed for lowest cost manufacturing, just like the Ricoh 55mm f/2.2 Riconar.  Cheap, cheap, cheap.

Once my aging mind was coming unstuck, I remembered that Saint Ansel used a Turner Reich 12-1/4" triple convertible as well as a Cooke 12-1/4" series XV triple convertible early on.  I've inspected prints made from negatives exposed using those lenses and the results are quite good. 

 

 

 

In use I've found the softness generated to by the Steinheil to be "gentler" than the Ricoh's.  The German lens is very well behaved across the field.  The extreme edges can be a little soft until stopped way down, but nothing compared with the Ricoh.  The field is as flat as can be.

My tail was wagging like one on a medium sized dog.

Trying to better understand what I was looking at, I found I've forgotten more than a fair bit of triple element three group history.  Wikipedia to the rescue.  Cooke designed the earliest examples of the triplet. See - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooke_triplet

Now I was really happy.  I felt I'd stumbled upon something.  Something secret.  Something delicious.  Something...

 

Except.  Except.  Except.  I didn't.  All too often late to the party, I find everyone who's anyone already knows about three element three group Cooke design lenses for small formats.   

It turns out the Germans, French, English, and Americans were cranking out Cooke triplets by the boats load! for smaller format 620, 120, and 35mm cameras.  The Germans continued this well and deep into the 35mm SLR times (1950's through 1980's).

Ricoh's 55mm that I was first smitten with is actually a four element four group lens.  So I'll not count it in the list that follows.  Simply remember it's cheap, widely available, and can be fun for use in soft focus work.

From Germany, I see the following Pentax M42 thread mount Cooke lenses - 

• E. Ludwig Meritar 50mm f/2.9 - East Germany
• ISCO Göttingen Iscotar 50 mm f/2.8 - Edixa M42 spec
• ISCO Göttingen Iscovitar 50 mm f/2.8 - Pracktica/Pentax M42 spec
• Meyer-Optik Görlitz Domiplan 50mm f/2.8 <- Soap Bubble Bokeh!!!  Ick.  Ack.
• Steinheil 50mm f/2.8 Auto-Cassaron

Browsing old catalogs shows these lenses were available under different model namings and different mounts.  Some lenses outside the M42 list above are more easily adaptable than others and I'm sure anyone with a keen interest in such things can quickly sort out what to do and which lenses merit attention.

I may post more on the topic after an ISCO arrives. 

Command Line Interface ~ Linux

I never knew it was "punk" to use a Command Line Interface, but it appears to be so. 

Once the idea struck, it became clear that, yes, indeed, I am increasingly anti-GAFAM (Google Amazon Facebook Apple Microsoft).  OK, so this blog is hosted on one of the GAFAM systems, but this can rectified at a time of my choosing.  Cell phone?  Yes, that too can change.  The tablet can change.  The Big Computer was for a very short period of time running a techno-tyrannical operating system, but most of the time for the past 30 years has been liberated.  It's a matter of effort.

Once I understood a little better the history of punk I could re-frame, re-context the contents of the prior paragraph.  Punk started as a youth movement that responded to arrogant "elite" class Thatcher-ism in the UK.  The US version of punk was something a little different.  It dealt with right wing politics and capitalism.  In both cases punk was a reaction to Bad Things perpetrated by "elite" powers far removed from the experiences of everyday people.  

GAFAM power is even greater than what the original punks responded to starting in the 1970's.  Techno-tyranny is extra-political and trans-national.  It determines what exists and what does not, what is remembered and what is not, what is acceptable and what is not, and it imposes a value system easily consumed by the masses.  Significant portions of the system is "free."  Whatsapp, Facebook, Blogger (the site I write this on), Gmail, Yahoo mail, Twitter (yes, I know it's newer name), Amazon, FaceTime, iTunes, etc, etc, etc on the surface and at first blush cost nothing.

The "costs" are carefully hidden from users.  Many (most?) "free services" on the internet are synonymous with loss of privacy, intrusive data collection, buying/selling of data, leading to a state of shockingly efficient, nearly seamless techo-tyranny means these services are anything but free.  Ads tailored just for our eyes are the least of it. We so quickly accept this as "the way things are" that we become numb to this truth.  Of course none of this is for our liberation, rather for our compliance and sheep-like acceptance.

I'm reminded of the early days of what later evolved into the internet.  We dug for information and knowledge using Gopher.  We spoke rather freely with each other via (unscanned for advertising opportunities) email (hosted on small systems), held community conversations on (largely troll-free) discussion forums and bulletin boards (both commonly hosted on small systems), and read news on something called Usenet.

It felt more like we were moving into a future of our shared creation, rather than a narrowly offered present imposed on us.  Freedom and liberty vs corporate tended bubbles of narrowed for our "protection" tailored for our unique, personalized, and therefore oh so special experience.  Such sadness to see things so incredibly controlled these days.

My effort to limit/restrict the influence of GAFAM now includes a review of tools used in photography.  Cameras and lenses are owned outright (this is the easy part, rather like a current day holdover of an earlier, simpler time).  My image processing tools are never rented and come from the Open Source Community (which, BTW, often implements industry standards _better_ than RentWare).  To speed the image processing pipeline up even further I sometimes use the Command Line Interface to invoke tools that do specific jobs quickly and efficiently.   I must, by definition, be punk.  Huh.  Never knew.  Doesn't change a thing, actually.

Here is my evolving kept for memory reasons list of commands, expanding to include the above motivations for their being in my life.

------------------ original post ------------------- 

Notes to self:  A few useful image processing commands for running in Linux.  All these are much faster to run from the CLI than using an app that's having to manage graphics at the same time. - 

convert *.jpg -average <averaged-filename>.jpg – averaging command

convert *.jpg -evaluate-sequence median <output file-name>.jpg  - a different averaging command

mogrify -format jpg *.png - change file format from png to jpg

mogrify -resize 1920 *.jpg – resizing command

mogrify -bordercolor black -border 10x10 *.jpg – adding a thin black edge to images

mogrify -bordercolor white -border 400x400 *.jpg – adding a white border to images

convert <filename>.<file-extension> -colorspace gray <output filename>.<file-extension> – command to convert a single image to black and white

for i in *.jpg; do convert "$i" -colorspace Gray  "BW_$i"; done – Bash script to convert a bunch of files into black and white

exiftool -a -u -s -G1 <file_name> - to read EXIF image file data

gmic -input <filename.file-extension> scale_dcci2x , cut 0,255 round output <theOutputFileName>.tif - command to perform a DCCI2x upsize

LibreOffice : Impress
menu Insert | Media | Photo Album :: Slide Layout 

 

Black and White digital filters in image processing...

I'm working up to a critique that I'll post at some point in the (hopefully) not too distant future.  To get there from here I want to cover Black and White digital filters in image processing.

The topic arose in my mind when musing over a digital recipe/filter that would accurately/correctly match the spectral response curve of early silver nitrate light sensitive materials, including but certainly not limited to wet-plate collodion.

I found a digital filter that I'm very happy with and for the sake of brevity I'll dispense with the steps I took to the final form.  If anyone wants the complete details, ask.

Here's the starting image.  Top and bottom are grayscale step wedges that I developed for the Digital Zone System I've worked on.  The center of the image is a simple color chip chart.   Examples were processed using RawTherapee.

Starting point -

 

Simple color desaturation - 

Relative RGB channel mix -

Luminance human perception modeling - 

Relative RGB channel mix "Ortho" filter -

Silver Nitrate relative RGB channel mix Red=0 Green=10 Blue=90 filter - 

Comments -

Short answer:  

Digital filters for Black and White color conversions seem to do what they're supposed to.

Long answer:  

Simple désaturation sucks. Colors don't translate to the tonality my eyes would expect to see.  Yet this is EXACTLY what old Black and White film does.  Sure, the ends of the color spectrum might be clipped differently on each end.  The meat of the curve behaves just like this simple de-sat.

Relative RGB channel mix is a minor improvement over simple désaturation. This is to be expected since all channels are set to 33 percent.

Luminance human perception modeling gives an accurate translation of colors into Black and White for the way I "see" tonality and luminance.   This is an outstanding foundation from which to build tonal separation in digital Black and White photography.  Further, in-camera Sony, Fuji GFX, and Panasonic Lumix S (the only system I've looked at) all appear to conform to luminance human perception modeling Black and White jpg generation.

Relative RGB channel mix with RawTherapee's "Ortho" filter seems to look very much like modern orthochromatique film response.  If I want early silver nitrate light sensitive material response, this is most definitely not what I'd look for.  Close-ish.  No cigar.

Silver Nitrate relative RGB channel set specifically to Red=0 Green=10 Blue=90 appears to hit the target.  The tonal response curve closely matches that of old silver nitrate light sensitive materials.  Goal!

A little more:

I could spend far too long looking/comparing/evaluating various combinations of channel mixture and digital filters and this and that.  Should I ever find myself in such a state I processed a number of images.  The collection of the Madness is found here, and scroll right.

In practice, I find the luminance formula in RawTherapee to be excellent for general Black and White conversions.  To explore the early pre-panchromatic Black and White photography "look" my little "Silver Nitrate" formula gives me pleasing results.

Processing an Image

Just for fun I thought I'd post a quick comment on how I processed an image I took at Rodin's Atelier in Meudon.

Image -

... and here's what I did to it: 

• Let the in-camera meter do its best
• Ricoh 55mm wide open at f/2.2  
• *click* the shutter 
• Opened RAW image in RawTherapee
• Applied my 0EV Digital Zone System curve
• Adjusted the ends of the curves for pure white and pure black
• Opened the image in the Gimp
• Back in RawTherapee, processed the sky for tonality and contrast
• Opened the sky processed image in the Gimp as a layer over the first image
• Gimp selected the sky of the first image
• Added a black mask to the second layered image
• Filled the selection area in the mask with pure white
• Adjusted the mask "sharpness" to Gauss soften with a 10 pixel radius
• Flattened the image and saved

Done.  That's it.  That's all it took to get these the way I wanted.

The trick, of course, was protecting the whites/highlights, then applying a correct Zone 3 thru 7 1EV step curve, and stripping in the sky. 

Lens Stories ~ Ricoh Riconar 55mm f/2.2

 

Cheap thrills.  That's the name of the game for this old fart.  Retired and living on a fixed income can do that to a person.  Under such Trying Circumstances it's thrilling to hit Pay Dirt, particularly when least expected. 

How on earth did I stumble upon this? Long story short, after reading about the Wollensak Raptar Series II and how it could be turned into a soft focus lens I've been in occasional Deep Cogitation mulling over the State of Things.  I like the idea of a "correct" soft focus lens for Full Frame and APS-C digital, _not_ one of those Over The Top spherical aberration lenses that everyone and their brothers-in-law already knows about.  All "soft focus" has _not_ been created equal.

Lacking sufficient Louis d'Or and Blue Chip Coupon Stamps for something like an Anachromat Kühn Tiefenbildner-Imagon 12cm, or a more modern Minolta 85mm f/2.8 Varisoft, or, heaven forefend, returning to large format with something very tasty mounted to the front standard and trying to find a darkroom somewhere in the Ilford/Adox Forsaken City of "Glorious Light", I turned what's left of my mind toward modifications that might be made to lenses. 

I looked at Russian Industar lenses.  Like the Wollensak Raptar Series II the Industar is tessar formula and looked for ways of controlling just how far in front of the factory installed position I could modify the position of the first element.  I looked at the Russian Biotar formula Helios.  These are easy to disassemble and "reconfigure."  And I thought about finding another Nikkor plasmat in poor shape and convert it (as I've done in the past).

Time Passes. 

One evening, casually enjoying the warm afterglow of a quite decent Alsacien dry, yes, bone dry, delicious Muscat and thumbing around the 'net I stumbled on a comment that I that caught my attention.

It was noted that the Ricoh Riconar 55m f/2.2 is not a "good" lens.  Commenters were complaining the thing has to be stopped way down to sharpen up.  Oh.  This could be Fun, right?  Soft, you imply?  Hmmm...

 

Looking up the lens, which until that moment I'd never heard of, and here I get all puffy-chested thinking I know so much camera/lens histories when in fact I don't, I found it's cheap and easy to acquire.  We're off to a Good Start.  Maybe an Old Man could afford one?  Short the wine stocks a bottle or two, tough things out for a couple days, and I'll bet I could see what's up with this Horrid Optic.

Before the lights went out for the night I found the lens is _not_ to be confused with a Fuji 55mm f/2.2 of similar vintage (not that I would've ever made such a Silly Mistake myself, um, where was I?).  The Ricoh design layout looks at a distance like an old Taylor Taylor and Hobson triple.  Squint.  See what I'm saying?  Except.  Except. Except, someone tore one down to find the Ricoh is actually four elements in four groups.  When I think of four elements in four groups I think of Artar process and Kodak 203 Ektar.  But the Ricoh is neither of those.  Strange things were unfolding at the Circle K.  I've never encountered anything so "odd."

Sleepily reading a bit further... a little light went on inside my head...  Damn! it was suddenly bright in here.  Gads. Shut that thing off, will ya?   It's time to go to sleep. FerKripeSake!  

There was an observation that the front element is used to focus the lens.  The other three elements remain stationary.  Stationary as in Not Meant To Move.  Stationary as the Rock of Gilbraltar.  Stationary as the English Monarchy.  Most likely they did this as a manufacturing/assembly cost cutting to the Bone Marrow Measure.  

OK.  My Curiosité Meter was now pegged.  I _had_ to have a look at this Slutty Easy Cheap Lens and see if it was as Beautifully Awful as was being suggested.  Front focus.  Simple element layout.  Cheap.  Widely available.  Did I mention cheap?  Easy, too.  Yes.  I think I just repeated me-self.

 

A very very short period of time passes. 

Glory Be! I get to keep my Sacred Bottles of Wine _and_ am now the proud owner of two of these Little Pieces of Crap.  10Euro.  15Euro.  How good is that?

Does it "work?"  Check out this series of images and tell me if you can sort out which images were made using the Ricoh.  Maybe it "works", eh?

Optical "softness" ~ three lens comparison

I have three optics that I've purchased over the years to see if I could use them as soft focus lenses on Full Frame and APS-C digital.  One lens is an early 50mm plasmat formula f/1.4 that shows spherical aberration when shot wide open.  One is an 85mm "meniscus" Soft Focus that has proven to be very difficult to control due in large part to its level of softness.  And one lens is a first element focusing 55mm lens that is proving interesting to understand.

The lenses are ~ 

• Nikon Nikkor-S 50mm f/1.4
• Pentax 85mm f/2.2 SF
• Ricoh Riconar 55mm f/2.2

The Nikkor-S is well known.  It's a classic plasmat design.  As the lens was designed well before modern high-refractive index glass became available, the 50mm Nikkor shows obvious spherical aberration at f/1.4.  The effect largely disappears at f/2.  Stopped down the lens is indistinguishable from current 50/55mm lenses.

The Pentax SF is a beast of the lens to work with.  There is an enormous amount of spherical aberration at all apertures.  It's so strong that at f/2.2 and f/2.8 the underlying sharpness of a subject is heavily veiled and overall contrast is low.  As the lens is stopped down the contrast and central resolution improves, the veiling spherical aberration decreases, but the edges begin to show weird coke-bottle-bottom smearing.

The Ricoh Riconar 55mm f/2.2 has a bad reputation on at least one of the Pentax discussion forums for being soft with inconsistant/incomprehensible behavior.  The lens is a four element four group design and uses the front/first element to focus.  The other three elements and aperture positions remain fixed.  I've not encountered modern-ish SLR lenses with this configuration outside of this one Ricoh.  The difficulty to control this optic comes from the fact aperture and distance change the character/rendering of the lens (though 'netizens don't fully discuss this fact).

Looking at these three different ways, I wanted to observe differences in how softness is achieved on a close subject.  Softness behavior on distant subjects would be different, but I wanted to begin somewhere. 

Wide Open ~

Wide open the Nikon and Ricoh show beautiful levels of softness.  The Pentax is quite obviously soft and of lower contrast (I used the exact same RawTherapee image processing recipe in all cases).

f/2.8  ~

Stopping the lenses down to f/2.8 shows how the Nikon is becoming razor sharp.  The Ricoh is cleaning up a little, too and the overall rendition is, to my eyes, rather pleasing.  The Pentax continues to show strong softness, though contrast is slightly improved over f/2.2.

f/5.6 ~ 

 

At f/5.6 the lenses are cleaning up pretty well.  The Nikkor-S and Ricoh look sharp.  The Pentax is still a soft focus lens, but the subject is more clearly and cleaning revealed and the overall contrast is vastly improved over f/2.2 and f/2.8.

Closer Look ~

Trying to understand how each lens treats sharpness and out of focus areas reveals some interesting details. 

I needed to stop the Pentax down to f/2.8 to show the subject better because at f/2.2 most of the details were lost.  Contrast is still low at f/2.8, but I begin to see what I wanted to see.  The left hand image is actually pretty sharp.  This comes from the effects of spherical aberration (which this lens has in abundance) on perceived depth of field.

The Nikkor-S is sharp at the point of focus.  The out of focus rendition is soft as one would expect.  Due to the lens design the transition from sharp to soft is dramatic. Modern high speed optics consistently behave in this manner.

On the other hand, the Ricoh behaves rather differently from the other two lenses.  The out of focus areas are extended due to aperture and spherical aberration (see the left hand image).  The highlights glow just as with early "pictorialist" lenses where the Nikkor-S and Pentax do not.  There's a sense of resolution that can be appealing even though the lens is not "bitingly" sharp.   Contrast wide open is the best of the these three lenses.

 

 

I can see why I feel the need to boost image contrast when using the Pentax 85mm SF.  The veiling spherical aberration is strong, but there's a potentially useful resolution under that veil.  In practice, increasing overall as well as local contrast during image processing might have some uses.  Back in the day I imagine photo-alchemists working to increase negative contrast as much as they could to try and overpower the contrast reducing veiling softness.

Nikon created a very decent lens.  At f/2.8 I see the level of optical correction improving to the point I can make a perfectly usable image in the current sense of such things.  The out of focus rendition remains soft and the contrast is nearly up to modern-lens levels.  For "soft focus" work, however, the optic doesn't really sing to me.  It's as if it's warming up but isn't quite ready for a full concert before an adoring "soft focus" audience.

Considering the overall rendition of the Ricoh at f/2.2 I see something I didn't think I'd ever find in a small format optic; controllable softness based on aperture and subject distance.  To me this lens behaves a lot like an early "soft focus" portrait lens.  While it's usable for landscape images (as I'll perhaps talk about another time), its specialty appears to be for portraiture and subjects closer to the camera.  This might be an optic worth exploring for "soft focus" work on Full Frame and APS-C digital formats.