Fixed- Focus Lens: De Meyer, who had begun exhibiting in 1894, was now producing portraits and large-scale still life arrangements taken with a soft-focus lens. This type of lens gave the pictorial photographer an optical control that could not be gained simply by throwing the image out of focus. With a true soft-focus lens, no part of the image is ever sharp because in their manufacture no correction is made for spherical aberration.
The Camera was loadf with twelve plates that were changed by pulling out at pushing in a brass rod. A sliding, spring-operated shu ter worked at a speed of 1/60 of a second. The lens w; set at fixed focus; Carpentier stated that photographe were incapable of focusing accurately enough to perm sharp enlargements to be made. A fixed- focus lensfocus enlarg was sold as an accessory: he boasted that with it "tl original negatives are easily increased to Vi-plate si [61/2 x 434 in.]-a matter of considerable moment operators making views for practical purposes."
His technique and aesthetic became one: "Unless I pull a technically fine negative, the emotional or intellectual value of the photograph is for me almost negated."19 He simplified his working method, preferring contact prints to enlargements, gelatin-silver paper to the softer plat-inotype. He replaced his expensive soft-focus lens with an inexpensive, sharply cutting rapid rectilinear lens. "The shutter stops down to 256," he noted. "This should satisfy my craving for depth of focus."
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Photography
