Slow Lens Required: Zille's photographs, for all their feeling for the urban environment and sympathy toward the working class, are slices of life, taken mostly with a hand Camera for a specific purpose: to provide documentation for his drawings, which appeared as illustrations in popular magazines. The very immobility of Atget's tripod camera, and the long exposures that his slow plates and slow lens required, seem to have fairly forced deliberation upon him.
However, although a long focal length lens is mandatory, it need not be expensive. The utmost of critical sharpness in a portrait lens is not necessary, or even desired, since considerable diffusion can be tolerated in portrait negatives. Your lens needn't be in a shutter for strictly studio portraits, either. A lens in barrel is perfectly satisfactory, since you can provide yourself with a simple Packard shutter to use behind the lens. Many portrait men actually prefer the Packard to the more costly between-the-lens shutters.
The first lens designed specifically for photographic purposes was Petzval's 1840 portrait lens. The images formed by this lens showed great loss of definition at the corners of the plate-a fault more theoretical than practical in portraiture, where edges mattered little. For outside work, however, particularly in photographing architecture, a lens with a flat field was desirable; and one free of spherical aberration, which caused straight lines to be imaged as slightly curved, was essential.
|
|
Photography
