Soft Focus Photography

[Lightdances]

Thank you to all who have posted on this topic, great info Ed! regards DD

[Marc-NL]

Hello Ed,

I like your article a lot.
And it's very good to see these 1980 images.
Bring back memories of me as a young photographer
Great Article!

[Ed Shapiro]

Hey Mark- Thanks for your comments. Those images were nor made in the 1980- Some of the are only 5 months old. This is a retro-look this is reminiscent of the 1930 and 40s when soft focus images were made may most portrait photographers. Using theses lenses nowadays give me another style to offer my clients especially those who want to be glamorized a bit.

Ed

[ccharrison]

You may want to read my articles on classic Soft Focus lenses. I have written 2 so far, part 3 will be out in the next few weeks.

Antique and Classic Soft Focus Lenses


Thanks
Dan

[tekdiver500ft]

You can get a very nice soft focus look in PhotoShop without the added expense of other plugins, too. You just have to know what it is supposed to look like. In this one, I was mimicking a classic film look with a soft focus grid, hence the faded color and prominent grain.

[Ed Shapiro]

DAN! THANK YOU! Soem of my favorites are in your list- I have used a few in the past and have some of them in my present inventory and use them often. Great going- you should post more.

Ed

[badpickev]

in the 35mm world nikon and canon both make defocus control lenses. sima made a 100mm f2 sf lens, it is cheaply made and came with 3 f stop discs. these pop up from time to time. there was a company called dreamagon, that made a m42 sf 90mm f4 lens,

[C Webb]

tekdiver500,
You have made a valient effort to achieve a "SF" image, however it truly in my opinion does not quite make it. While soft it is, it looks nothing like an image made with a true soft focus lens. Your image is exactly what folks that don't know what a soft focus photograph looks like, so the assume soft focus means slightly out of focus and fuzzy. Your image as nice as it is simply looks O F and Fuzzy. My point simply is do more research study real soft focus
images, then show us what you have learned.

C Webb

[Ed Shapiro]

We can talk about how soft focuses work or don't really work based on optical science. We can discuss areas such as zonal aberrations, floating elements, diffusion filters and go on forever. It sometimes seems that there are as many optical theories and formulas as there are soft focus lenses and accessories. I have owned and used many of them, for me, however, the proof of the pudding is in the tasting. The end result is what determines the usefulness or simply the "look" that each lens has to offer.

To me, the king of all MODERN soft focus lenses is the Rodenstock Imagon. The old instruction sheets were kinda funny because they stated that there are many ways of using this lens and pretty much left the photographers to their own devices in figuring out the multitude of effects that could be derived from that particular lens. It can be used with the disks or without them or with the diaphragm built into the shutter or with no aperture control at all.

My other favorite is difficult to use nowadays what with the difficulty in finding steady supplies of large format film in the 8x10 and 5x7 sizes. That lens is the Taylor Hobson and Cooke- the one where the sharpness/softness control looks like a pair of brass knuckles. This lens has floating elements and can be tack sharp or romantically soft.

My most practical lens is the 150mm SF Sekor for my Mamiya 6x7 camera. This lens works similarly to the Imagon with the perforated disks and is very fast working. I can shoot portraits as fast as I need to capture expressions and poses and still achieve soft results- no muss- no fuss and film holders to change or the slowness of view camera operation to put up with.

I understand that Canon has a current 135 mm soft focus lens, I have never used used but I saw the results- they are impressive.

There is a little known Minolta SF lens that was made for the Minolta X500 and X700 series- modest but very nice little cameras. I used that lens and achieved great results on 35mm film.

The lenses that give me the "look" I like do not "de-focus" or degrade the image in any way. There seems to be a primary sharp image over which a soft secondary image appears. When the highlight bleed into the shadows the is a kind of optical retouching that takes place and no significant post production retouching becomes necessary where a glamorization effect is desired. To a certain degree, Zeiss Softar filters achieve this effect but my favorites are real soft focus lenses nonetheless.

There were also many other designs; Schneider produced a number of "convertible lenses" where by removing the front element component, the remaining element would mimic the single element (really 2 elements cemented together) of the Imagon. When that was done, the focal length became too long and slow for practical usage. I had a few of theses for my view camera but prefered to keep the lenses intact for conventional commercial usage. The Kodak Portrait Lens was another old favorate.

Ed

[RACAIN]

A lot of great information..thanks everyone..