>explain something that is literally explained in the picrelare you brain damaged?
>>4518701No, I don't shoot straight photography
>>4518677Seems like it was a rare example of his early experimentation with soft focus lenses from my 30 seconds of research.The soft focus effect is quite strong in this image. I wouldn't call it pictorialist, but it's definitely not f64 type straight photography. Somewhere in the middle maybe. Ansel used many different techniques to produce b&w images that looked good, but were definitely not just "what was there", and I don't think that was ever really the point. Pictorialism tried to imitate painting through photography. F64 wanted photography to be its own distinct form of art seperate from painting/drawing. I would argue a soft focus lens can produce a photograph that remains distinct from what the pictorialists were trying to do, and therefore still maintain the "photography as its own artform" goal.I suspect that his apprehension to use soft focus lenses was because the reliance or heavy handed use of the effect could easily stray too far from what he considered straight photography, but who knows. Interesting thing to ponder.
>>4518677Do you know what book this came from? I'm curious about footnote 118
iirc he used them for portraits at least
>>4518726Nope, it's pictorialist. Pictorialism is a big tent.And he used to be a Pictorialist, this being one of his early images.
>>4519258But what made it pictorialist?
>>4519267IDK, the use of a soft focus lens to create an ethereal scene? That's stereotypically pictorialist.
>>4519372I was under the impression that pictorialists were attempting to replicate or mimic painting styles of the time through photography. Does the use of a soft focus lens always make an image pictorialist?
>>4519378Few agree or have ever agreed, even when pictorialism was in vogue, on precisely all the elements a photo must have to be pictorialist. Soft focus and an ethereal impression (sort of like what you would see in many 1800s landscape paintings) are just so common in pictorialist images, that a picture with those elements could probably be best described as pictorialist. Especially so with that Adams pic as he used to be a bona fide pictorialist in his early days.There were different ways some of them tried to be "painterly". Many used not just soft focus but also special processes to to render an image that really looked like a painting; Leonard Misonne is probably the most "painterly" one there was. "Mimicking painting styles" is kind of nebulous as many pictorialist images are still clearly photographs in final appearance, technique, a "photographic"/non-painting-like composition, etc.
>>4519381So you think he kept it in his bag on the off chance he could use it and still be respected by the other f64 nerds or what?
>>4519387I don't know. He isn't a favorite photographer of mine and therefore I know little of his personality. So what *I* think he did it for doesn't matter. It is however a strange contradiction that he would rail against soft focus lenses, but keep one in his camera case at all times until retiring from photography. If he never intended to use it, it would be pointless weight and space use in the field. So he must have used it...? I don't know, strange...
>>4519381>>4519391Yo, thanks for posting Misonne. I did a bit of a shallow dive into pictorialism on Wikipedia recently, and really liked the idea. These bangers you posted are incredibly painterly. Any other pictorialists worth checking out?
>>4519398I can only recommend a somewhat narrow range of pictorialists (as I said, it's a big tent) because I only care for the painterly landscapes. Some pictorialists would shoot "artsy" nudes from time to time and I don't care for that at all. You will have to be careful in your research.Lynn Geesaman is great, especially her color work. She was what you might call a "neo-pictorialist" but she was old enough that she probably learned from some of the true pictorialists.Heinrich Kuhn made some wonderful landscapes, still lifes, and pictures of his family.Peter Henry Emerson had an eye for painterly compositions and wrote a book that apparently inspired a lot of pictorialists. Ironically he was one of the early proponents of straight photography but his opinions were confused and he would contradict himself constantly.The Russian pictorialist Nikolai Andreev shot some beautiful country landscapes. Not sure what else he has shot.In my recent studies I have seen a little work from John Paul Edwards, Hans Watzek, and Frederick Evans that I have liked.There are lots more; you will encounter them in your researches.All in all the world of Pictorialist Landscapes is a big world that is mostly forgotten as most shooters today have the technical knowhow to take tack-sharp, perfectly exposed images but have no sense of composition or when a scene has substance or not. I think photographers like Misonne show a different path photographers can take, focusing on transcendent scenes of beauty to be slowly contemplated.Study the work of those you like, pick up some soft-focus lenses, and study composition as if you might be a painter. Making cyanotypes would also be a nice introduction to making physical prints with a painterly texture. You can make negatives from your digital images with your printer.Good luck; I've only seriously started down this road myself recently... (pic related is one of my own experiments - 5D4 and a 43mm Yasuhara Soft Focus Lens)
>>4519398Nikola perscheid has some fun portraits and other pretty cool work. He even made his own soft focus lens that has cult status amongst soft focus nerds today.>>4519425Soft focus lenses are quite fun to use. Im glad to see someone else using them on here!
>>4519425Here's my favorite soft focus image Ive taken aside from some portraits I've done. It's a 4x5 wetplate taken with an Hermagis eidoscope from the early 1900s.
>>4519432Interesting effect. I've thought about moving to a larger format (digital medium format) for better soft focus lens selection, but my adapter for my Minolta Varisoft (MD to EF optical adapter) just arrived and the Varisoft works well. I can stay on my 5D4 for a while.Bigger formats are better for soft focus, though. A GFX 100s may be in my future...For now, I'll be quite busy making the most of my 35mm lenses. I've started a real collection of them this month. The Varisoft for one, but also the Canon 135mm Soft Focus and even the super rare Tamron 70-150mm Soft Focus. I snatched that one up from KEH in bargain condition for $237, and I will see soon if the glass is in good condition....Here's another pic of mine.
>>4519457Wow a soft focus zoom, cool. The hermagis is a convertible, so that kinda counts I guess, although much less convenient.Large format is definitely ideal for soft focus imo. I think you need the fidelity to create a pleasing and balanced glow/softness to images and the effect is too much with smaller formats in a lot of cases. The aberrations become extremely pronounced on smaller formats and just override the entire image. You can usually stop down to subdue the effect.Right now I have the hermagis, a rodenstock imagon, cooke soft portrait, and a very rare perscheid, although I have not been able to use the perscheid because I can't mount it without having a retaining ring machined for it. Huge as vintage brass barrel lenses are so cool and fun.You may want to consider hooking your gfx100s to a bellows so you could adapt some vintage brass to it. Could be very cool to have that as a possibility, and very easy because your camera has a shutter already.Here is another hermagis shot, 8x10, shot at f6. Forget the film. Possibly foma100.
>>4519464Try the Spencer Port-Land if you can. Great soft focus lens - for large format, if I'm not mistaken. For medium format, the Pentax 120mm soft and the Mamiya 145mm Soft have also been recommended as great soft focus lenses.Larger formats definitely have that "look" that full frame pictures usually lack, that look of "depth" or pop in the image. For GFX pics I read some guy put it down to the "amazing Fuji glass" but I'm seeing that same depth in pics taken with old, uncorrected-for-aberration soft-focus lenses adapted from 35mm, lol. What an idiot.I don't have a GFX and it appears that now, thanks to my optical adapter, I won't need to move to mirrorless, but the GFX is definitely ideal for digital pictorialist images. The GFX 100s will probably be my next body, whenever it is I get one.
>>4519539Apparently my cooke soft focus has a similar restrained softness that is somewhat similar to the port-land, although the portland is a much simpler design optically, so who knows.. All the designs have their own character as you probably know. The cooke is a three element anastigmat, and the port-land is a simple two element cemented achromat.This was taken with my cooke at full softness level on 8x10. I forget the aperture I used, but you can definitely see the differences in the two lenses. The eidoscope gives a much more "unrestrained" glow with much less field correction. The perscheid has an even stronger glow to it because it uses both SA and CA for softness. A really interesting thing about the perscheid is that it introduces whats called chemical focus into the equation because of the chromatic aberration. You actually need to focus on feel because the light projected onto the ground glass lies to you. I'm so annoyed my local machinist never called me back. I want to understand that perscheid so badly.Why not get a 250-400 dollar 4x5 monorail? You get to shoot and develop a lot of film before it catches up to the cost of a gfx100
>>4519539You could even get a 120 filmback adapter for your 4x5. The sinar zoom allows you to shoot between 6x6 and 6x12 variably without wasting frames, and you can pick up a frameline adapter that lets you properly fram your medium format film between those formats. They sinar zooms are between 500-800 dollars depending on if you get the V1 or V2 version. The horseman/linhof fixed format 120 backs are much cheaper if you only wanted to shoot in 67 or 69, and they fit on a bunch of different monorail systems. They're usually between 200-300 dollars.Sinar also sells an accesory shutter called the sinar copal shutter that mounts onto the standard/bellows and gives you a shutter independent of whatever lens you use. You get 8s to 1/60th with them, and they run around 600 dollars. Still cheaper than your gfx!I use the copal shutter as a portable solution for my shutterless LF lenses, and it works great.
>>4519544>>4519540>Why not get a 250-400 dollar 4x5 monorail? You get to shoot and develop a lot of film before it catches up to the cost of a gfx100At the moment it's mostly because circumstances don't make some of the alternative processes convenient to do anywhere in my house. A film MF or LF camera is ideal but digital is nice because I can develop my photos very easily.A dimroom would be doable for me though, for cyanotyping. I'd still use digital negatives for it though, at least until I got good at making cyanotypes.
>soft focus lensWhat's the difference between this and>HDF filter>Vaseline on lens>Digital bloom
>>4519642Those methods don't utilize spherical/chromatic aberration to overlay a soft glow on top of a sharp image. They are not necessarily bad, but they are different. If you like the look of vaseline or pantyhose stretched over a lens then more power to yah. You'll definitely save a lot of money.
>>4519649>>4519649>spherical/chromatic aberration to overlay a soft glow on top of a sharp imageYes, that's right for soft lenses. True soft focus is softness over a sharp core.The alternatives are worse than you think. They destroy resolution to make the image seem soft-focused, but they're really just soft. Filters, vaseline, pantyhose etc are not real alternatives because they have a different and inferior result. Digital bloom can be effective but it's a lot more work than just using a soft focus lens (the best of which have variable soft focus including a normal sharp image to start with). Plus, every "good" implementation I have seen of soft focus has been done in camera. That doesn't mean you can't do a good job digitally - you probably can - I just have never seen an extraordinary result from it.
>>4519684Exactly. Even stuff like film without an anti-halation layer that produces glow does not recreate what a soft focus lens produces. The other more subjective take is that soft focus lenses are true "character" lenses and part of what makes them so great is that their intentionally flawed optical designs produce that unique character. Cooke, hermagis, perscheid, pinkham and smith, verito, imagon, port-land etc all produce a unique soft look. Most modern lenses look 95-99% the same. Sharp and well corrected.That's why it can actually be worthwhile to own and familiarize yourself with a few different soft focus lenses. One small note is that basically all soft focus lense's softness is controllable via aperture because smaller aperture always reduces aberration. Some have a secondary softness dial like the cooke knuckler, which moves an element to add or subtract SA, so you can maintain shallow DoF.Snapshit is Cooke adapted to 5dm3 shot wide open and full softness. Night and day difference between the horse pic taken with the same lens and same settings.
>>4519684>>4519693I was literally going to buy the EF 135mm f/2.8 Soft Focus despite it being 30 years old and optically worse than a similar lens I own, but figured I could just digitally soften any image I wanted.I understand the theory of SA (and Canon's RF 100mm Macro even has a control called that), but I really would like to see an image that uses organic soft focus compared to a digitally altered soft focus image where I can truly tell the organic one is superior.
>>4519699The problem is that in every forum thread I have seen, no one who claims they can get better results in post has shown the differences side by side (in-camera SF, x focal length, x settings vs digital SF, x focal length, x settings). I recently got the EF 135mm in the mail and could provide some raw test shots for you to test.You should still buy the EF 135mm yourself, play around with it extensively at the various softness levels (including no softness) and try to see if you can do better digitally. Just return the lens if you don't like it. It's an inexpensive lens.It's not the best 35mm SF lens though. Trying to do better than a Minolta Varisoft would be harder.
>>4519699Does digital softening work as well on a jpg as it does on a raw file? If jpg works I can setup a quick still life tommorow and use one of my soft focus lenses and a sharp lens framed the same so anyone could attempt to get a similar aesthetic digitally. I would use my 5dm3 adapted to a monorail camera to use my LF lenses.I dont have the skills or desire to learn how to digitally soften images, so it will be up to someone else, but I can definitely provide the pics for it if you're interested.
>>4519704>Does digital softening work as well on a jpg as it does on a raw file?I wouldn't expect so. I don't think any editing is done better with JPGs than RAWs.Can't we upload RAWs on here? If not you could try a temporary file hosting site like catbox to share some RAW test files.
>>4519705Okay. Catbox used to not work for me for some reason, but now it does. I'll post them tommorow.
>>4519703>recently got the EF 135mm in the mail and could provide some raw test shots for you to test.Oh, you fuckin legend. Even just some snapshits would be appreciated. But it'll only be any use if I can compare it to a photo you took with a non SF lens with some digital softness. It's a handful of effort so I have no expectations but if you could I'd apprecite it.>>4519705>>4519706>share some RAW test files.>I'll post them tommorow.Much appreciated m8.
>>4519731We are 2 different anons btw. Seems we both have the Canon Soft Focus. Myself, I'll see about going in the woods today for some snapshots.
>>4519731I'm going to be out on business this week, but I can get you a direct comparison of the 135mm f/2.8 SF to the 135mm f/2 when I get back.Do you have a preferred subject in mind?
>>4519735>We are 2 different anons btw.It's easier to assume everyone named anon is the same person. That way the schizophrenia makes more sense.>>4519739That'll be genuinely helpful. I'm not particularly picky about subject. Something like a flower bed seems ideal but realistically it doesn't matter.
Okiedokie. I got the raws uploaded to catbox. Two soft focus and two sharp ones framed almost the same. Used the Hermagis eidoscope and a couple Apo sironar lenses for the sharp ones.The two collages I'm posting are the sharp lens and then wide open f5 f7 and f10.Good luck trying to recreate this!https://files.catbox.moe/xrbw5i.CR2https://files.catbox.moe/kheavq.CR2https://files.catbox.moe/zpppfo.CR2https://files.catbox.moe/58egn1.CR2
Collage 2. Notice how the spherical aberration creates the glow around the stalks and how it changes so dramatically as you stop down. Pretty neat to see the actual images instead of just observing the change through the ground glass.
Here is the full image. This one was at f10, which I think has the nicest balance to it. The softness is extremely exaggerated on full frame compared to 8x10.
f7 looked pretty cool for this one.
>>4519904These are really cool, thank you for sharing! How did you manage to get image xrbw5i (the flower pot) looking so sharp?? Which settings and lens did you use? Very pretty.
>>4520182Thanks. It was a fun test. I kinda want to see how the other soft focus lenses I have compare now.Idk really. Maybe the lighting and being able to super precisely focus using liveview 10x zoom + the geared focus on my view camera.I used a 180mm sinaron se at f11. Really nice LF lens.
