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