Who says old lenses are no good

Superb. In my eyes, your best picture on RFF.



raid said:
Steinheil 85/2.8, Kodax TMAX3200


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By golly there are some nice photos turning up in this thread. Beautiful.

I am always amazed at the technical capabilities of old glass. I am even more amazed that given this, lens manufacturers have managed to stay in business designing and selling new glass for so long. :)
 
peterm1 said:
By golly there are some nice photos turning up in this thread. Beautiful.

I am always amazed at the technical capabilities of old glass. I am even more amazed that given this, lens manufacturers have managed to stay in business designing and selling new glass for so long. :)
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Hello Peter,
A good photographer has many lenses she/he could choose to arrive at excellent photos. The old lenses were very good from the start. A good lens does not have to have perfect optical qualities.
 
raid said:
Hello Peter,
A good photographer has many lenses she/he could choose to arrive at excellent photos. The old lenses were very good from the start. A good lens does not have to have perfect optical qualities.
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I agree Raid. I understand that lens makers need to stay in business so they keep innovating (often in fairly trivial or unimportant ways given the minor improvement in results produced) and many people keep buying in pursuit of better images.

But at this stage while I am, I acknowledge, a bit addicted to lenses, my interest runs towards the old ones which as you say may be less than perfect but which often produce nicer images as a result of those imperfections. So many "perfect" images I see on Flickr are bloody boring. Often just made apparently to demonstrate a lens' capabilities rather than anything more interesting.

Never the less I have bought far too many lenses in my time. Far too many! Most of them at least 30-40 years old, some much older. But they are for the most part much cheaper than new ones (excluding some collectibles and rarities) meaning I can indulge my hobby much more. I seldom pay much over $100 and often much less and even the image quality of some of these are the ones I love the most.
 
I feel the same way, Peter. I the past few years I bought a few "modern" lenses. They are not among my favorite lenses. I love the old Zeiss 5cm lenses, say. They have a great history too. I ask myself, who used this lens since the 1930's?
 
Only because the Summar was a cheaper lens to manufacture Erik ;)

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Two images shot with a 1898 Folding Pocket Kodak (What a year later would be called the FPK No.1), with your bog-standard Meniscus, choked at f/11.
 
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