Perhaps this has been mentioned already. Cooke Optics LTD has
produces a lens (Cooke Portrait PS945 Lens 229mm, f/4.5) which they
claim is derived from a Pinkham & Smith design. The lens retails for
about $3000 U.S. here in the states.
Following text is from the Cooke website at:
"The original design of this lens is from the vintage Pinkham & Smith
Visual Quality Series IV Soft Focus Lens used by early 20th century master
impressionist photographers. These talented photographers made soft focus
photography an art form using, most notably, Pinkham & Smith lenses, yet
today, this original lens design offers much more. Use the Cooke PS945 to
capture portraits, fashion, landscapes, weddings and for artistic
experimentation. It lends an emotion to product shots that you just can't
achieve afterward in Photoshop."
"The original Pinkham & Smith lenses achieve their distinctive soft focus
in a manner different from other lenses. Using the traditional glass
available at the time, craftsmen hand-corrected multiple surfaces of the
lenses to achieve their unique soft focus look. The introduction of
aspherical surfaces gave Pinkham & Smith lenses a higher-order spherical
aberration that results (when the lens was used fully open) in an image
with both very high resolution and a self-luminescent quality. Cooke has
reproduced the unique performance of these hand aspherized lenses using
modern design techniques that duplicate this unique soft yet
high-resolution performance exactly."
--greg schmitz <gws1@columbia.edu>
Received on Fri Jan 21 06:56:34 2005
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : 02/01/05-09:28:09 AM Z CST