Radioactive Lenses and Everything About Them

When I was in school, we had a teacher who was really into photography. He liked to show us collections of slides of photos he'd taken throughout the 70's, 80's and 90's with his vintage camera equipment.

Honestly, we all groaned every time he'd bust out a slide reel, but the pictures were beautiful. Some of the best pictures I've ever seen. I'm not a huge photography buff or anything, I've learned some of the basics of photography, but that's about it. I'm really not even sure why, but, they were just nice to look at. Not just the composition of the pictures, but the colours and the saturation, they just felt good to the eye. I'm not really sure how exactly to describe it.

> This is not the first time I have read about old lenses making for a more pleasing picture, but I have to question, how true is that really?

Partly myth partly reality.

Older lenses used simpler designs, simpler coatings and simpler glass elements. These simpler designs mean that these lenses have poor optical performances, they're usually (at wide apertures) only sharp in the center, have more vignetting, chromatic aberrations, spherical aberrations, optical vignetting in the out of focus areas, they can flare, have less contrast, &c. all of these elements can give a distinct look to the images created by a lens.

New lenses are designed through computers to correct all these aberrations to offer edge to edge sharpness, no vignetting, &c. but at the same time it makes them look very boring (to some) from an artistic standpoint.

The recording medium also has a big importance, film, be it b&w, color negatives or color positives all produced different looks that we now instinctively associate to certain eras. The color science behind these is pretty complex and very subjective, hence the large number of different film emulsions that existed back when film was mainstream.

>Realistically, am I ever going to want to use a manual focus lens again? Likely not, and my assumption is that this probably applies to most people.

Manual focus lenses are popular again thanks to some updates with digital technology. You can have the plane of focus highlighted in color show up on the screen in many cameras. If your subject is in focus they will appear fringed in some color like red. For mirrorless cameras you can see the plane right in the eyepiece, and can hit a button and zoom in at the focal point to confirm you are hitting your subjects eye rather than their nose.

the history of photographic lens design starts with simple single element meniscus and bi-convex lenses. Those early lenses were awful at accurately focusing what was in front of it, and over the next 170 years or so, there were hundreds or even thousands of lens designs many of which were trying reduce or eliminate all the different types of aberrations. By the time the 70's hit and software was starting to replace manual ray tracing for lens design, we started getting very accurate lenses, but manufacturing was a limiting factor. Today that is much less of a limitation and you'll find lenses with 20 elements, aspherical elements, and tons of stuff lens designers from the 70's could only dream of.

By eliminating aberrations to the extent that they have, some people will call the new lenses "characterless". In some cases that may be an issue, but with modern digital cameras and photoshop, its probably better to start with an accurate lens, and tweak your look in software, something you'd have much less flexibility to do if you started you capture with, for instance, a petzval lens.

But there are some of those old designs where their imperfections, are to many people, beautiful. And for me, I shoot only film, and lately only large format film, so I need to capture the image the way I want to see it. Yes, in a darkroom I can burn and dodge, and use other tricks to change how the final print looks, but there is a lot of stuff I can't add back in, so for me, capturing images with those imperfections allows me to create interesting scenes and looks.

NOTE: I actually know very little on the technical side about optics and optical design, consider the above more of a historical thumbnail with opinion mixed in. I would love to find an "optical design for dummies" book, because its something I'd love to learn.

> I doubt there's anyone who reconditions 1960s slrs to like-new anymore.

I can think of two people online who CLA Pentax and Nikon SLRs and there is a shop in Tokyo that specializes in fixing old gear. From time to time Nikon will service old gear too.

Old normal lenses are still great for taking pictures of people. New huge normal lenses have edge to edge sharpness, can shoot in strong backlighting, and can shoot in daylight wide open without exposing every little optical flaw and in the lens design.

Some of the flaws can look good in a photo: spherical aberration can give highlights a pleasant glow.

So yeah as a studio lens or for picture of people vintage lenses 35mm-135mm can deliver the goods even now.

I own the exact Minolta Rokkor lens in the photo but I knew of its radioactive nature. I picked it up on eBay over 10 years ago.