Vintage vs Contemporary Lenses

[Jon Lewis]

Since I’m just getting past the ‘I have an image!’ stage I was wondering if anyone had any experience as to which lenses work better for the process. I’d expect (for no educated reason) that newer lenses are finer than older lenses. However, I remember someone saying that vintage lenses focus UV light better than contemporary lenses.

There is also something about using a vintage lens (in a vintage camera) with a vintage process but being contemporary daguerreotypists, there’s an option of modern equipment.

[dagist]

Jon,

The most important consideration with lenses is speed; the faster the better. A lens that can put f/2.8 or f/4.0 light on your plate is what you want to find if you are making daguerreotypes 4″ x 5″ or larger, and especially if you want to shoot people. If you make smaller images, even faster lenses are available. The lens’s speed isn’t really an issue though, if all you want to make are landscapes and still-lifes, where your subject isn’t moving.

Whether you use a vintage brass lens from the 1850s, 1890s or a modern lens from the 1990s, doesn’t really matter. They can all produce sharp, detailed and beautiful daguerreotypes. Modern lenses offer the advantage of having anti-reflection coatings which will reduce internal flare, and they are generally sharper from edge-to-edge, but don’t be fooled into thinking that 1850s lenses aren’t sharp, they are, and the daguerreotype process can really make them look great. The vintage lenses often suffer from internal flare which reduces the overall contrast of the image, but it can often work to a daguerreotypist’s advantage in controlling scene contrast.

Vintage lenses are NOT better at focusing the light (UV or the visible spectrum) than modern lenses. It is modern lenses that focus the three primary colors closer together (closer to the actual film plane) and have fewer lens aberrations that end up being visible in the final image. Ideally, you want the visible spectrum to focus at the same plane as any UV light that might also add to your daguerreotype’s exposure.

Another consideration is, that if you are going to make daguerreian portraits, many modern lenses are just too sharp and contrasty to produce the pleasing skin tones that vintage 1850s lenses did. I am currently using three different soft focus filters (at the same time) on a modern lens, in order to soften the light enough that flesh tones look pleasing to the eye. All the fine detail is still visible, but not so sharp that it looks harsh and unflattering.

You must also match the contrast of your lens, with the contrast of your subject/scene, with the appropriate sensitization times and development, in order to achieve the best results.

Large format process-lenses make excellent daguerreian lenses for non-portrait subjects (they’re not very fast though) because they focus all three colors precisely at the film plane. They are designed to be used at close-focusing distances of 6-10 feet from the camera, but work superbly well at infinity too. They usually have the word “Apo” in their designation indicating apochromatic correction (all three primary colors are corrected-for in the lens design, not just two), and they’re usually quite reasonably priced these days. The whole-plate daguerreotype I made of the White House in my gallery page here, was made with a 610mm Apo-Nikkor process lens, which was designed for use on a copy camera.

Cheers,

Rob McElroy

Buffalo, NY

[Author]

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