Jonathan, I know I should have been working on your lens today when I was making this photo.  What do you think of the look of this one.  It is a tweaked 14" triplet which retains it's 14" focal length and easily covers 8X10.  I continue to tinker with this stuff because the day will come when all of the old fabulous famous lenses will be in collections and folks will want to make soft photos even though there are no more lenses.  This is no Pinkham & Smith surely.  But it is none the less interesting.  What do others think?

Just published at my website.  Here is a link;

http://tonopahpictures.0catch.com/JapaneseLanterns/The_Japanese_Lanterns_7_Portrait_Lenses.html

and here is a teaser...

Three Flutes

I did some more images with the SW lens.  I usually stear clear of naval gazing but I included some questions that I've been mulling after reading some of what Alvin Langdon Coburn wrote nearly 100 years ago.  The rest of the images are here if you're interested.  Funny thing is I'm not nuts about most of Coburns pictures.

http://tonopahpictures.0catch.com/Secret%20Weapon%20Lens/More_SW_Lens.html

The lens is the front element from a type of modified petzval that theatres used to use.  It has a big magnification at the front that gives a larger f1.9 aperture number.  Used alone it is just a grossly uncorected doublet that throws a lot of light everywhere.  It focuses at about 7 inches but the defocus happens so fast that you can get a total merge of everything in just a few inches.  It can't "see" to the end of the 3 flutes which was only about 5 or 6 inches from the point of focus.  More techy stuff.  I used Efke 100 film rated at 100.  Exposure with normal overhead kitchen lighting was 1/1.6 sec at an effective f10.  The D200 has that setting so I simply "listened" to the Nikon about 5 or 6 times, practiced with the packard a couple of time, and squeezed the bulb.

This image was done with a lens I nearly threw away.  It's a little 4+ inch projection petzval I had sold to a guy and he asked if he could send it back.  It was so long and narrow that it would barely illuminate 35mm film.  And the rear group had problems so I almost tossed it overboard when it came back to me.  The front group is a simple doublet but it's big.  About 2 1/4 inches across.  I took the front group and mounted it on my Kodak 2D and this is the first image I made.  Actually I was trading out another lens and had already been looking at this subject.  When I looked at the ground glass this image was there.  Pure magic.  For once I had the sense to not adjust or tweak anything.  I put a piece of 6.5 X 8.5 film in, calculated the exposure and made this image.

Bamboo no. 1

I made 2 other images with this lens and I'll share them when the paper is dry.  It's been a printing session that has taken my breath away.  Hey, that's why we keep slugging it out year after year, isn't it? 

This is a different lens than the first one I showed pics from. 

Tea Things 

 Nash #1

Nash #2 

I moved outdoors because I wanted to see if some of the softness would translate similarly when moved out from the subject.  Both of these TR's are modified.