I have a couple of old enlarger lenses that I bought for Infra-Red (IR) and Ultra-Violet (UV) photography. Since I have sold my IR/UV converted camera I wondered what these lenses would be like on my modern camera. Actually the results were surprising good.
I will show some examples first then, at the end, discuss some of the technical aspects. These photos were taken in our garden, which is my wife’s domain, showing flowers, plants and hardware.
First I will show examples of ‘enlarger lens 1’:
The above photo is a little lacking in sharpness but has, in my view, a softness to the colour rendition and wonderful bokeh (out of focus highlights). At ‘setting 2’ the sharpness improves but still has the same bokeh:
The third example has more of the scene in focus but retains the softer colours and some of the bokeh:
This next pair of photos uses the same lens at 2 settings:
These two still have the same tonality which I like. The next pair show the same scene using ‘Lens 2’:
This second lens is from the same manufacturer as the first but a different focal length – I moved the camera back for this.
This next pair is of a third scene with the first lens:
Again, I love the colour rendition for both lenses – this is the second lens:
Some technical notes:
These lenses are Wray Supar enlarger lenses that I had to adapt to fit the camera. The first is a 3¼inch f4.5 lens, the second a 4¼inch f4.5 lens (about 83mm and 108mm respectively). I think these were manufactured in the 1940s-50s.
They have click stops for setting the aperture (in whole stops) but they are marked, not with f numbers, but relative stop numbers: 1,2,4,8,16,32 – more useful for calculating exposure times in the dark room. These lenses are mounted on vintage bellows for focussing.
An interesting exercise and one that I shall repeat.