Soft Focus Converted Velostigmat

[Jim Galli]

doorway to life​

Click on the image for a few more. I dismantled and re-spaced the front elements of a 1916 - ish Wollensak Velostigmat Serie II 8 1/4" f4.5 lens. Stopped down it is equally unique in it's look. These are on 5X7 inch film.

Ahhh, the pleasures of brute force tonality.​

 

[Asher Kelman]

doorway to life​

Click on the image for a few more. I dismantled and re-spaced the front elements of a 1916 - ish Wollensak Velostigmat Serie II 8 1/4" f4.5 lens. Stopped down it is equally unique in it's look. These are on 5X7 inch film.

Ahhh, the pleasures of brute force tonality.​

It's remarkable, Jim, still a few folks looking at this will need to be ushered in to what's gong on. There was a time at the birth of the 20th Century when lenses were suddenly too sharp for most portraits to be gentle. Gradually, mechanisms for degrading focus at the periphery or throwing a proportion of defocused image into the plane of sharp focus, allowed for some beautifully drawn images, not only of people but also objects.

Jim is one of the few people a a rare bunch of little green men, still meets with secretly bring the strangest gifts in long forgotten lantern projections lens, gun turret glass or odds and end in French or German that are mixed with old dominos and glass slides and several brass tubes from someone's cigar rolling machine. Out of such odds and ends, Jim swops glass, barrels and makes things that people will now pay top dollar for. Only difference is that Jim sells at a very fair price to photographers and not collectors.

This picture is worthy of printing. Compositions with Bibles can be trite but here there's some meaning and feeling of families who trust in each other and stay close and have beliefs that matter. I'd have preferred a worn bible for this kind of meaning and perhaps other signs of continued activity. A lock that's not attached to a door has such a different array of meanings, so I haven't as yet worked things out. Still, the composition is interesting. The ability to render the central core sharply yet gently roll of this in softness and illumination is effective.

Thanks for sharing!

Asher

 

[Cem_Usakligil]

Hi Jim,

This picture and the ones on your web site look very good indeed. How did you know how much to displace the front element of the lens, was it trial or error to a certain degree? I am truly impressed, in any case

Cheers,

 

[Doug Kerr]

Hi, Jim,

These are all lovely results.

It is curious. Perhaps it is the engineer in me, but I normally find images in which the main subject is not "sharp" distasteful (even in cases where the effect is supposedly "intentional"). Yet I have no such feelings here.

Aesthetic perception is such a complicated thing.

Thanks for sharing this wonderful work with us.

 

[Ruben Alfu]

Stopped down it is equally unique in it's look.

Hi Jim, the soft focus has its own magic but at small apertures it looks wonderful to mee too. Thanks for sharing!

 

[Asher Kelman]

Jim,

What was the focal length and would you do this for an 8x10 format? I'm wondering how it would fare against your prestigious lineup of soft focus lenses and these.

Others in OPF who have never shot larger format or film and thinks one judges a great portrait lens by the evenness of illumination and high MTF graph lines to the edges, visit Jim's website and get lost in the lush world of classic large format photography imaging. You do not need numbers or any calculations just sit back and enjoy the presence of the people or the objects in the pictures.

If anyone finds salvation, let me know. Shout "Tonepah!" and I will hear you and know another soul has been saved!

Asher

 

[Jim Galli]

Well, thank you all for your wonderful comments.

Asher, this was an 8 1/4" (210mm) lens.

The Wolly Velostigmats are a recent phenomenon among the little clan of soft focus afficionado's. Originally, they catalogued an option where the front lens group had a defocus control numbered 1 - 5. At 5 it had increased the distance between the elements only about .020 inch. Not enough to see much of a difference. Some of the guys noticed that if you kept unthreading that thing and really adding some space, the lens took on a really beautiful quality.

Wollensak offered that feature on the larger lenses only, beginning at 9 1/2". So my idea was to take one of the smaller lenses and accomplish the same thing somehow mechanically. I need to work with it some more, but as of now, I don't think the $67 Wolly has un-seated the Pinkham & Smith. Oh, and my spacing was just an ecucated guess. I used a piece of .062 solder to create the shimming.