Hi Jonathan, hi folks,

here is a new one from my series of forests. The first one is made with a P&S VQIV and the second is made with a Voigtländer Universal-Heliar. Quite a different, isn´t it?

All the best fro Berlin

stefan d

I've exhausted any and everything I could think of to shoot w/the Kodak Portrait lens, but I was thrilled shooting w/this lens, a truly great and user friendly SF/portrait lens which is at this time, a fairly inexpensive semi-achromatic cousin of the Pinkham Smiths.

I've run out of things to shoot w/the Kodak, time to shoot w/something else, and w/a different motif, so I've reached for the one lens I haven't 'aired out', the Gundlach Achromatic Meniscus alias the Pinkham & Smith 'Synthetic'.  

The first shot is of a vase that I'd already shot w/the Kodak Portrait but w/a dark motif, the second image is of a plain reflector, and the third is of a decorative bottle flanked by two magnifiers. 

The Gundlach nee Synthetic wasn't given a lot of respect by some folks, and has snuck under the radar, compared to the more famous Semi-Achromatics and Visual Quality, but again, you can exhange the character/personality/signature of these lenses as you change subject matter/lighting/exposure and for me the different signatures of these various lenses are simply 'starting points' rather than a constriction.......These lenses can change/exchange personalities.

Some things that've become evident to me from messing around w/these things.....You do have a choice of whether you want a halo/glow/halation around your subject matter(underexpose-lower illumnation or increasing shutter time keeping the lens wideopen).........You can get  some sharpness/crispness/smoothness in the foreground subject matter and transition from that to the abstract/stylized background effects these lenses tend to create.........if you keep winding up w/mush when you use these lenses, mush that you don't want, it's you, not the lens.  

If making things soft were the only things you could produce w/these things, I would've stopped buying/using them a long time ago.   The way they create transitions from BR to FG, and abrstraction, and the surreal, is what keeps me excited about them.

This is an expensive vase, and as w/all inexpensive glass, it's mis-shapen and 'cockeyed' as hell.   I've never purchased anything like this that was ever perfectly symmetrical, but then again I could never bring myself to purchase a $500.00 vase, that isn't in me.

I've got the cam/lens at a very steep angle shooting at this, and it's backlit as usual.

Execution notwithstanding, these magnifiers were really the perfect subject matter for me.  Idyllic really, something that can function as a lens, combined/juxtaposed into geometric shapes, as it distorts and/or magnifies. 

I lined up the outside of these magnifiers with the outside edges of the brushed aluminum sheet as a continuous line as it seem to make sense visually.  The glass artifact holding up these 3 magnifiers is evident in the center. 

I feel as if I've gotten everything they have to give, at least for the moment.

One magnifier is oriented horizontally, one vertically, and one is angled on its corner tip, producing various triangles and trapezoidal shapes.  What is curious, is that where all three magnifiers overlap, you can see through to the distortion created by the glass artifcact which is holding up the magnifiers.

Take care