[LargeFormat] cult lenses

[Clive Warren]

At 12:12 pm -0400 2/6/03, Les Newcomer wrote:
>I'm beginning to think that the cult has less to do with the lenses 
>and more to do with Dagor77 aka Andrew Glover.
snip
>Wollensak made a number of soft focus lenses and within the 
>mushiness lies a lot of lore, and a lot of lies. They also made a 
>lot of lenses for Graflex under the Optar name and for themselves 
>under the Rapax name, but these were produced in great numbers and 
>don't qualify for cult status.
snip
>  A lot of Dagor's lenses are lenses from the printing industry. 
>They were expensive to make, had to be excruciatingly accurate in 
>color fedility, resolution, and contrast.  The only thing they 
>didn't have to be was fast, so these are typically long lenses 
>19inches plus and slow, f10 or so.  They do work well on large 
>format as long as you have a bright and sunny location like Clive 
>has. ;-).  Actually because they are long lenses they aren't that 
>difficult to focus in diminished light as the light comes in nearly 
>on axis.

Thing is that it's easy to start believing your own spin :-) You can 
soon bring yourself back down to earth from the heady stories of 
abandoned log cabins filled with rare protar lenses from dagor77 by 
looking at Kerry and Chris' lens tests (URL at 
http://f32.net/links.html) A lot of the cult lenses are actually 
rather poor performers by modern standards and some are just too dim 
- but if you are shooting for contact printing then it really doesn't 
matter too much.

If money were no object I would have a set of contemporary 4x5 lenses 
and some of the smaller 8x10 lenses. But the old lens box would still 
be in use - one of my favorite 9x10 lenses is a 183mm Protar in a 
Volute air shutter, wide open at f18 Yep - there are usually two days 
every year when there is enough light to see the image on the ground 
glass :-) Night vision goggles (also a cult item available on EBay) 
are the way forwards for the remainder of the English year.

One of the cult lenses is a Cooke convertible - these old lenses are 
reputably sharp but have 16 air to glass surfaces when used 
unconverted. The real stories from users at the time report having to 
be rather careful to avoid ghost images due to all that light 
bouncing around in the glass. Cooke are planning to produce a new 
8x10 convertible using their superb multicoating technologies. Now 
that may be a cult lens in its own bedtime - sharp and high contrast!

Still, it may be that low contrast is what you want, in which case.......

Talking of cults, the same effect is in place for cameras. Some real 
basket case Deardorffs have reached astronomical sums on EBay. You 
have to ask yourself....why? I find myself looking at Shen-Hao 
cameras again.

Still - it could be the time to sell off some of the old glass 
sitting around here and invest in some new lenses and a new camera:-)

Cheers,
        Clive