The following is on the heals of looking at another very well corrected, very sharp lens, the ISCO Westromat 50mm f/1.9. My sweet little Nikon Nikkor 85mm f/2 is a unit focusing ernostar 5 element, 5 group formula lens and is the subject of today's investigation.
Reading the Minolta Portrayer filter instruction manual led me to understand that longer lenses (85mm to 135mm) could respond better to certain kinds of filtration.
Here's how to read the following graph.
Comments ~
There are several lens/filter combinations that fall into the old brass soft focus lens blur ranges. This is rather exciting to see and it makes me wonder if soft focus filter designers knew/know more about their craft than I've in the past given them credit for?
One aspect of using a well-corrected lens for soft focus work is that the edges of the field may behave differently than they did in early optics.
However, as is carefully noted in many journals and writings of the day, including Biblioteque de la Revue de Photographie - L. de Pulligny - C. Puyo "Objectifs d'Artiste Practique et Theorie des Objectifs et Teleobjectifs Anachromatique" - Biblioteque national de France (BnF), longer lenses were often the focal lengths of choice to very specifically avoid field edge aberrations at wide apertures (ie: portraiture).
In fact, the only photographer I know of who has succeeded, to my way of thinking, of leveraging field edge problems to outstanding effect is Alex Timmons. Which means the Nikkor 85mm may be just perfect when used with soft focus filters in the more traditional way. The time has come for me to validate this in the "real" world.
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