Lenses ~ going small

Two Flickr friends have me falling down yet another Wabbit Whole.

It started with trying to find soft focus lenses for 35mm format that are more controllable than the special purpose built optics.  Chetworth del Gato and I had been talking about old large format soft focus lenses work.  To mine this vein of potential richness it was a matter of trying to find lenses that might exhibit similar properties optically and mechanically.

Once on the soft focus for miniature formats path it became evident there was a whole field of lenses I'd avoided and/or, knew nothing about.  Bonzo Din suggested I consider a lens or two of a specific kind and the next thing I knew I was enjoying learning about and understanding German lenses built during the 1950's for the 35mm format. 

Here is where I'm currently at -

Clockwise from bottom left...
- Staeble Choro 38mm f3.5 - 3 element 3 group
- Staeble Telon 85mm f5.6 - 4 element 3 group Antiplanet
- Roeschlein Telenar 135mm f5.6 - 4 element 4 group
- Steinheil Cassarit 45mm f2.8 - 3 element 3 group Cooke 

As can be seen, these are m39 thread mount lenses made for the Braun Paxette series of cameras. To illustrate just how small that 35mm lenses can be I added the NEX5T/Pentax-M 28mm f2.8 kit as size comparison to the first image shared above.  

NOTE: The m39 Paxette have a 44mm ffd, and NOT the 28.8mm of the more commonly known m39 ltm Leica Thread Mount.  These are the smallest lenses currently in the Toy Box.  

In terms of sharpness and character...

- Staeble Choro 38mm f3.5 - Sharp in the center at f3.5 with softness increasing towards the edges.  Sharp at f11 across the field. Decent chromatic aberration control and excellent field flatness.  Rumored to be better than the first Leitz 35mm f3.5 tessar formula, which also was best at f11.

- Staeble Telon 85mm f5.6 - Sharp.  Period.  Well, OK, perhaps not clinically sharp wide open, but close enough.  Quite the surprising lens, actually.  Field flatness and chromatic aberration are well controlled.  If there's a downside it is the lack of decent flare control.  Shooting toward off-axis brightness very quickly shows the challenge.  So this is pretty much a Sun Over The Shoulder kind of lens.

- Roeschlein Telenar 135mm f5.6 - Sharp in the center from wide open. The edges never really clean up, even at small apertures, where chromatic aberration, particularly in the out of focus areas, is some of the strongest I've ever seen.  Though I must admit that my Nikon Nikkor 10.5cm f2.5 "tick mark" behaves rather similarly towards the field edges, and I LOVE that lens.  Perhaps I'll come to appreciate this tiny Roeschlein, too?

- Steinheil Cassarit 45mm f2.8 - I used this as a soft focus lens for two months in Italy. First in Napoli and then in Rome.  It's underlying sharpness mimics that of large format film soft focus lenses quite well.  Bright areas glow correctly.  Sharp in the center from wide open.  By f11 it's sharp across the field.

At first I wondered if there was something wrong with this Cassarit as the "glow" remains pretty much constant across all apertures.  Bonzo Din's Cassarit doesn't do this, but there's someone  using a Sony A7 that showed two slightly different versions of the Cassarit, both of which do exactly the same thing mine does.  So who knows? 

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

Lists of Paxette lenses - incomplete

Fitting a m42 adapter for Paxette use 

My own blog post on adapting Paxette lenses to mirrorless cameras 

Manual Focus forums has slightly different information 

 

Things that caught my attention ~ Winter in Italy

While away this winter my mind wandered and stumbled and came upon a few things.  

While not immediately photography related, I find the process of musing over these topics informs and directs how I approach the craft.

 

~ Culture Defined

The first is a renewed appreciation for how received culture impacts my view of, well, just about everything.  

Culture is delivered/given to us.  We consume it.  We participate in it - for or against.  It's something I seldom think about but (all too often passively) agree/disagree bound by limits set by culture itself.  

Which led me to a question: Can I think beyond those boundaries?  What would it mean if I did?  How would I see the world differently?  How would I behave in the future?

Fortunately there are plenty of hints and ideas.  

 In Europe Antonio Gramsci and Stuart Hall explored how the control of a small class of people defines culture for the rest of us.  In the US there are Howard Zinn, David Graeber, and Noam Chomsky who looked at the imposition of culture through politics and money.  In literature we have the example of Cervantes in the early 1600's and his hero, Don Quixote.  More recently we have Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jack Kerouac, all of whom looked at culture from various perspectives.

What I do, what we all do, in photography and art is caught up in culture as we experience it.  How we see.  How we react.  How we do.  All of it.

 

- The Renaissance

European art experienced a "rebirth" starting in the late 1300's.  I wondered, a "rebirth"?  What was the first "birth?"

Our trip to Napoli and Rome helped me see.

Renaissance paintings commonly show we humans as we are.  Architectural features correctly rendered.  Compositions and subject are proportionally correct.  This was obviously different than the iconography of the Eastern Roman Empire what were simplistic with subjects and elements disproportionately distributed.

What came before? 

In Napoli we visited a museum that holds many wonderful fresco that were taken out of Pompeii.  One room is filled with what I found to be incredible examples of correct human shapes, an correct architectural proportion and perspective.  All pre-dated the Renaissance by 1500 years.  It was instantly clear to me that Roman artists knew quite well what they were doing.  This had to be a bit of the first "birth."

Similarly, with sculpture I've marveled at the incredible beauty of Bernini's figures, Michelangelo's sculptural stout firmness and power, and Canova's exquisite line and execution.  For me many of their works have the power to emotionally move me.  

It turns out so can classic Greek and Roman sculpture. The Capitoline Museum and the Villa Doria-Pamphilj in Rome house early works that I've found to be absolutely exquisite.  The Greeks and Romans led the way and I finally understand what is meant by "Renaissance." 

An incredible world of art existed many centuries prior.

This made me wonder if everything had been forgotten and needed to be re-discovered?  Or if everything remained in the continuum of art but had to be left out due to the demands of those who employed artists? 

 

- Caravaggio 

One artist is credited with the introduction of "chiaroscuro" lighting.  

It's the kind of light that, if we are speaking in photographic "Zone System" terms, moves skin tones from Zone 6 up to Zone 7 or even 8 and takes the shadows and moves them from Zone 4 down to Zone 2 or 1.  

At the Doria-Pamphilj we saw several of Caravaggio's early paintings.  They are quite "classic" with open shadow details and muted highlights. They could've been executed by any of the early Renaissance masters as they fit the general style of the time.   The arc of his work spans from early flat, calm paintings to later contrasty drama.  His later works are what we tend to know him by, and I was quite surprised to see examples of his earliest paintings.

However... his lighting (as important as it is, what with the immediate impact it had on European painters during Caravaggio's lifetime) is most definitely _not_ the thing I find the most interesting about Caravaggio's work. 

When we were in Napoli we visited a chapel in the Pio Monte della Misericordia where a Caravaggio hangs over the altar.  It's titled "The Seven Works of Mercy."

At first I wasn't sure what to make of it since it failed to conform to expectations I had about, what?, I don't know, just about everything.  The lighting was harsh and slashing, which I expected from Caravaggio.  

There was something else going on in there.  After a minute or two a 5watt bulb turned on in my mind.  I had to stand and look and experience and appreciate what he'd done.  He'd broken one of the prime "rules" of painting.  *snap*  As if it were a little twig to be played with and disfigured. 

All the important action was pushed to the edges of the frame.  The center, ah, yes, the center contained shockingly nothing of interest, and in that light it could be seen as nothing more than a black space, dead center, a black nothingness.

Could it be that Caravaggio's greatest contribution to art was his sense of composition?

Oh my.  There could be freedom in this.  Maybe.  Yes.  Likely so.

Things are shifting.