A slight addendum to the previous post on the Wollensak lens; I’ve now had a chance to shoot it on 8×10, with results that don’t drastically change what I found on 5×7. I got some mechanical vignetting from the shutter, unfortunately; it’s not clear how I can use this for full coverage on 8×10, other than as a close-up lens (where it likely won’t excel) or by putting it in a shutter (at considerable cost).

This is f/32 and 1/15s on FP4+ (developed in HC-110), cropped to remove the truncated corners. Unfortunately the sun came out at the last minute and put the shadow of the camera in the frame, and on the ground glass I didn’t appreciate how intrusive it was going to be.

At this reduced viewing size it looks pretty good, but of course this is shrunk down from a scanned file of about 20000×16000 pixels. Here’s an actual-pixels section of the moss that seems to be the point of best focus:

It’s actually pretty good resolution, although I didn’t nail the correct point of focus (this is from the stone wall to the right of the fern). I plead guilty to operator error. I may try to re-shoot this fern for (1) better focus, (2) no intrusive shadow, and (3) tighter framing of the fern allowing more bellows extension and hopefully avoiding the cut-off corners. It also could stand to be shot more open for reduced depth of field.

I’ve also done some reading on Wollensak serial numbers, and while it seems that no one has a reliable mapping of dates, this lens at serial number 110xx is quite early. I’m guessing 1920s, but it’s really no more than a slightly educated guess.

Here’s a lens of a different character: a Wollensak Extreme Wide Angle Series IIIa, intended for 8×10. The Wollensak catalog specs it as a 6-1/4″ lens (159 mm), which is only moderate on my 5×7 format but quite wide on 8×10 (about the equivalent of a 23 mm lens in 35mm format).

It’s fully open at the odd aperture of f/12.5, although I’ve read online that there’s a stopper hidden inside that can be removed to allow opening it further (for focussing—you probably wouldn’t want to shoot at the wider aperture).

Wollensak documentation is not very complete, and I haven’t been able to date the lens. The 1922 Wollensak catalog describes it as “the new Series IIIa”; in 1950 it’s still in the catalog but described as being coated (or “Wocoted” as Wollensak called it). This example is not coated, so I guess it’s safe to date it between 1922 and 1950. Wollensak didn’t publish diagrams of their lenses as some other makers did, but online sources say fairly consistently that this lens is a four-element design similar to a Series IV Protar.

My test shot of the oven was taken in fairly dim conditions, making focussing a bit of an adventure. This is f/22 at 14 seconds on Fomapan 100 (at EI 50 as usual):

The fence in the background seems to show some distortion. Close up, the chain on the oil lamp is resolved at an OK level:

(As with the other posts, these are negative scans that have gone through digital post for contrast.)

I tried it out on the same foggy landscape as the 7″ Dagor, with results that are compositionally mediocre (the foreground is cluttered with houses and power lines) but look good enough as far as the lens is concerned:

A crop on the left-hand side around the prominent bare tree makes a better composition, although it’s a pretty small fraction of the negative:

All in all, not a bad lens. It doesn’t resolve as well as the 8-1/4″ Dagor, but it’s usable. I need to give it a spin on 8×10, where it should be more in its element as an ultrawide.

Today’s lens is another one that seems like it should have a good chance of seeing regular use: a 7″ Goerz Dagor in a brass barrel, with a later serial number than the 8-1/4″ (likely early 1920s, but it falls in a gap in the Goerz serial number lists I’ve been able to find) but in terrible cosmetic shape. The rim has a lot of corrosion, and I can’t get it to come apart for cleaning, which is a shame as the glass is quite dirty with debris from inside the barrel. It looks like it would clean right up if I could get to it.

This is slightly wider than a normal lens on 5×7, roughly the equivalent of a 35mm lens for 35mm. Unlike the earlier 8-1/4″, this one is marked in f-stops.

Here’s a test exposure: the same scene as before, exposed at f/32 for 14 seconds on Fomapan 100 at EI 50. There’s some sunshine in the frame for a change, but the oven and stone wall were in rather deep shadow. Again, I focussed on the chain on the oil lamp near the centre.

At the lower left, where it looks like there might be a fractional light leak or something, I think it’s a bit of flare from a bright spot just out of the frame (subsequent shots from the same day show the sunlit area creeping into the frame there).

Here’s an actual-pixels crop (before sharpening) of the chain at the point of focus:

The detail here isn’t very good, but it looks like it may be operator error rather than the lens; in looking around the image at 1:1, I found that things looked sharper near the right-hand side, where the oven door cover is:

So I think I simply missed the point of focus, or perhaps was bitten by focus shift when I stopped down. (As usual, I tried to check focus after stopping down, but at f/32 it’s difficult.) The lens may also be seeing some degradation from the dirty glass.

Here’s a landscape shot with this lens, over the treetops on a foggy day:

This wasn’t really intended to be a formal test image, so it’s had some manipulation in the digital domain, mainly to darken the sky. Nothing is razor-sharp in this shot, but pixel-peeping suggests that I focussed closer than intended again; the sharpest things in the image are the streetlight in the right foreground and the vertical bare tree at the extreme left margin, rather than the more distant trees.

On balance, I don’t think this lens is performing to the same standard as its bigger brother, even allowing for my failings in focussing. In the big picture the renditions are pleasant enough, but the resolution of detail isn’t great when looked at closely. I’ll continue trying to find a way to clean this lens, and see if that improves matters.

Of the lenses from my great-grandfather, this is the one I expect to use the most on 5×7. It’s an 8-1/4″ Goerz Dagor, with a serial number that places it in 1908.

Dagors are sort of cult lenses, with a complex and interesting history to which I can’t do justice here. The design was the work of Emil von Höegh in 1892; purportedly he first pitched it to Zeiss, and when they turned him down, to Goerz, who marketed the lens first as the “Double Anastigmat Goerz” and from 1904 on as the shortened form “Dagor”. The design has given birth to a lot of lenses from various companies, including several incarnations of Goerz themselves (both in Germany and the US).

Note that although this lens looks like it has a brass rim, it’s just from wear; this is not one of the much later “gold rim” Dagors. (From what I can gather, the gold rim Dagors are no different from the others in design, but they do come from a later era when manufacturing technology and quality control may have been better.)

One interesting eccentricity of this lens: Instead of f-stops, the aperture is marked in “US” (Unified System) stops, a different standard in which 16 corresponds to f/16 and each doubling of the number corresponds to a halving of the light—thus U.S. 32=f/22, U.S. 64=f/32, etc. This was a pretty widespread system at the time.

Here’s a test exposure at f/32 (7 seconds, using Fomapan 100 film at EI 50 on a cloudy day). The subject isn’t anything to write home about, just a brick oven in my back yard. I focussed on the chain of the oil lamp near the centre of the frame. (Since Dagors have a reputation for focus shift when stopped down, I did my best to check the focus at f/32, but it was pretty dim at that aperture.)

A disclaimer: This is a negative scan that was given normal digital post-treatment, meaning I scanned it very flat, adjusted the contrast in the digital domain, and gave it a light sharpening. The scanner is an Epson 4990, the ancestor of the current V800/V850, operating at a nominal 2400 dpi with Vuescan. In other words, this is not a critically accurate lens test, and it certainly isn’t a precision test of lens sharpness. I’m exploring how these lenses fit into my hybrid workflow with the tools I have, rather than chasing theoretical performance. (If you’re chasing theoretical performance, you probably don’t want a 110-year-old lens anyway.) I’d rather be making optical contact prints and scanning those, but I just moved house and I don’t have a setup for optical printing yet.

All that said, here’s a tight crop of the chain on the lamp, in the original scanned pixels with no sharpening applied (and no spotting of the scan, you’ll notice):

I’m not sure if the detail on the top of the lamp really is blown out in the negative; there’s not a lot of texture there to capture in the first place, and clearly the scanner didn’t find anything. The chain is pretty well resolved.

For variety, here’s a second shot with the same lens, a closeup of the moss on the stone wall:

This was a 12-second exposure at f/32 on FP4+ (ASA 125). In this case it wasn’t bright enough to check focus at f/32, so I didn’t adjust, but the image ended up in reasonable focus; I don’t see evidence of a gross focus shift here.

I’m pretty happy with the performance of this lens. It’s a normal length for 5×7 and I expect to get a fair amount of use out of it. I may have to think about getting it mounted in a shutter.

This site intends to document my experiments with lenses in barrel for large-format photography. (This means the lens has no shutter; it’s mounted directly in a “barrel” that contains the aperture iris, but the lens is permanently open to light.)

I shoot mostly 5×7 film, using an Eastman View 2-D camera, seen below. Mine dates from about 1927 and was made by Folmer Graflex, a spinoff of Eastman Kodak (they separated in 1926); I picked it up years ago from Igor’s Camera Exchange. It’s a basic working 5×7 camera, with minimal movements (front rise/fall, a little bit of rear tilt, and nothing else) but a good ability to keep the dark in.

The strange device the camera is wearing instead of a lens is the other tool that really makes these barrel experiments possible: a universal iris with a Packard shutter. I inherited this indirectly from my great-grandfather, a pro photographer who shot mostly landscapes in his spare time. The idea is that you position the lens inside the iris blades, clamp them down on it (using the thumbscrew on the left in the picture), and the iris holds the lens in place while the Packard shutter behind it controls the exposure. The whole assembly came to me mounted on a mystery lensboard; my wife fabricated a mount to adapt it to the 2-D, so I can shoot virtually any lens with this thing.

Along with the universal iris, I have a handful of lenses from my great-grandfather, including some very nice camera lenses but also some oddballs like consumer-grade enlarger lenses that you wouldn’t necessarily want to mount on a camera (but I may well try anyway). Add to that the occasional find from eBay or an antique store, and I’ve got a fair set of lenses that need exercising. They’ll appear here as I get around to them.