Re: dreamy Nikon lenses
You can make dreamy flared pictures with a Sima 100mm soft focus lens. It
is all plastic and very cheap, but quite versatile and easy to use.
Don Sweet
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ryuji Suzuki" <rs@silvergrain.org>
To: <alt-photo-process-l@usask.ca>
Sent: Friday, July 18, 2008 8:40 AM
Subject: Re: dreamy Nikon lenses
> FYI, there was an interesting article describing variable soft
> focus portrait lens for Minolta 35mm camera written by their
> soft focus lens engineer several months ago on the Journal of
> the Society of Photographic Science and Engineering of Japan
> (article in Japanese, except for the figure captions, I think).
>
> Also, Konica Hexar AF uses a lens whose spherical aberration
> is intentionally undercorrected. It produces very nicely
> "soft" image superimposed on sharp image, and with crisp
> contrast, at wide open at f/2. It becomes more or less usual
> "excellent" performer at about f/3.5. Of course, due to the
> focusing error caused by the residual spherical aberration,
> rangefinder cameras and SLRs cannot afford to leave this much
> spherical, but Hexar AF calculates the focus error and
> compensates in its AF algorithm. Very clever.
>
> One thing I wish existed was a camera just like Hexar but uses
> 6cm square format.
>
> Ryuji