General information on soft focus/portrait lenses

<P>The introduction of the new Cooke Portrait lens got me thinking

that I know <I>nothing</I> about soft focus portrait lenses, and

I could find very little information on the web. While I am usually

an extreme sharpness freak, all the talk about a $3k lens peeked

my interest, and I began looking at some of the 'pictorialists,'

whose work I had dismissed previously as asinine, or at best mindless

romanticism. Well--I admit it--I sort of liked the fuzzy pictures.

</P>

 

<P>Always being the knowledge junkie, I tried to get even basic

information on these soft focus, diffused focus lenses, but I

can't seem to find very much. Does anyone know where one might

go to find information on these lenses? (other than <A HREF="http://

home.talkcity.com/EaselSt/clock-doc/softbook.htm">Jay

Allen's</A> $50 self published book).

Other than a few brief references in the standard texts on photographic lenses (Kingslake, Neblette) and a few bits and pieces on the net, there isn't much. It looks like Jay Allen's book is probably the most comprehensive study of these lenses.

Just one point - you do realize that soft focus and portrait lenses are not necessarily the same thing, don't you? I'm not sure that the terms as commonly used are terribly well-defined, but generally, at least as far as I understand it, a soft focus lens is much more severe in terms of its under-corrected spherical and other aberations than a portrait lens, which tends just to give what I would describe as a 'creamy' result.

 

In case it is of interest, I am presently doing some comparison tests of a 360mm Imagon (a soft focus lens), a 12.75" Ilex Portrait lens, and a 360mm Sironar-N, which is a good example of the best modern multicoated glass - all of these on 8x10. I'll be putting the results up on my web site and will post a reference to it on this forum - probably in the next couple of weeks.

 

Huw Evans

Hi Jason, well, there is several kinds of soft lenses, and of course who cares what the difference is as long as you get the image you want. And I bet you can get that look for a lot less than 3K. There is the Imagon which is a single cell mounted behind the shutter, and then you put a disk on the front of the shutter with a bunch of little holes in it that improves the focus of the image. Wollensak made a couple of types, one has an element behing the shutter and a single element in front and the diffusion is manipulated by the f/stop; It's sharper with a little hole and it get fuzzier as you open it up. Then there is a type where you can change the distance between the two front elements by rotating the outer element, and with this style you can control fuzzy and depth of field. All the above is - you know basically true. I've all three, for 4*5 in the 240mm range, and the most I paid was $250 for the Imagon because it was in copal. They all make interesting images, the Imagon has a more modern shutter and so you can stop action better.

 

Now the stuff that is harder to find out. Even if you get a soft focus lens, I don't know if you replicate the photos you see without taking into consideration how they were exposed and printed. Basically, again going out on a limb of gross generalization here, you are looking for a high-contrast sceen with a good strong highlight, and what you are going to do is spill the highlight into the shadow detail. This is the hallmark of the soft focus effect. As I understand it, you will want to use a slow flim and the right developer so you get max smooth grain. All things being equal, and they never are, you will get a better image from contact printing. I figure that a good neg might be thin, and so it seems to me that the technic is to slightly over expose the neg. And don't forget as long as you are doing weird stuff, there is nothing to stop you from applying a little pencil to the neg. as Annie Bridgeman (I think that's how you spell her name.) did.

 

I think you might even be able to achive soft focus effects with the lenses you have now. One option is using a soft effects filter like a Softar, and I understand you can make one with model airplane varnish or something like a skylight with grease on it. Or you can just play with the focus of you lens. Then try underexposing slow fine grain film to suppress the amount of detail in the image, and perhaps with blue filter if you want an ortho look. Then again, no promises. I almost forgot, don't forget to experiment with a polarizing filter as you can really make subtle changes to the highlights with one, try this trick; it really works.

 

Good luck, David