“Bad” lenses for 5x7

So chastise me as you may, I really like my Holga. I also love the look of Sally Mann’s Immediate Family, in which several of the images are taken with lenses that go a bit crazy towards the edges of the frame.

For large format I mainly shoot 8x10 with a Sironar-N 360mm 6.8. Lovely lens, sharp as a tack. But I’d like to experiment a bit more with crappier lenses. Lenses that are decently sharp in the center but get a big wild as you get to the edge of the frame. I’ll only be contact printing so sharpness is relative here.

I know my Holga has a simple meniscus lens but I think it is actually decently sharp for what it is. The two meniscus lenses I’ve tried so far on my 8x10 are FAR too wild. They only start to look half decent at f22 or smaller, and even then it’s only a pretty small area that looks reasonably sharp and by the time you get to the edges of the frame they are way more crazy than the Holga. Maybe I just need to find much larger lenses so they have bigger coverage and I’ll get a better image, but I’m having trouble finding one in the 190mm range that’s decently priced. so far I’ve used a 42mm dia, 195mm FL and a 58mm dia, 250mm FL. Next I will be trying a 86mm dia 250mm FL lens next but 250mm is a bit longer than I was hoping for anyways for 5x7 work, even if it does get me closer to what I’m after.

anyhow I was wondering if you guys had any suggestions for essentially what would be considered “bad” lenses in that sort of 180-200mm focal length range to shoot on 5x7.

thanks in advance for any suggestions!!

Somewhere around here I've got a Wollensak Velostigmat 8 1/4" in barrel that looks hideous, basically worthless, so I opened it up and put a spacer in that increases the space between the front two air separated elements. That actually accomplishes the same thing that the fuzz-u-lator dial did on the larger sizes of the same lens. It's a tessar type. But that trick only seems to work on the early versions. Later Raptar which was also a tessar must have changed the formula because they don't react to the mod much if at all. But the early lenses will get a nice softness to them. I've used .032 solder to make spacers or I've also simply spaced the rear element in the front group out a bit and glued it in place with Crazy glue. That's actually reversible later if you want to put it back to factory specs.

Another 'bad' lens we've used is the ordinary Turner Reich triple convertible. Get one that has the crazing between the elements. The earliest versions were in a casing that would unscrew and the glass would just come out. They are 5 glasses cemented together. Three front glasses are wider than the 2 rear glasses. The balsam failure happens between #3 and #4, the last wide one and the first narrow one. What you do is literally knock those rear two elements completely off of the structure. So now you have 3 elements instead of 5. Clean off the old cement with some acetone. Put those 3 elements back in the lens. You'll find that the focal length hasn't changed, but those final two glasses were for corrections that are now missing. They just give a wonderful subtle softness all over that way.

Last but not least. Old projection lenses. They are Petzval types but most are too short to work on 5X7. 4 1/4" is common. 5" is common. (like this one) What you do is just take off the front group and point it at your film. It's an achromatic meniscus doublet. A 5" petzval usually has about an 8 1/2" front group by itself. Finest achromatic meniscus out there. They can be pretty soft though. If you cobble those onto a shutter with an aperture you stop down to taste.

That's about a million dollars of my wasted money finding all that stuff out, for free. Enjoy.

Try to build a rapid rectilinear type lens around a shutter... Two +2 diopter close up lenses (simple meniscus) will give you around 250mm.
I built a 600ish out of minolta and leitz achromat close ups with good portrait habilities and made adapters to screw them into a #3 Shutter.

I was going to say that I frequently see cheap rapid rectilinear/aplanats cheap on eBay that are listed as 5x7 lenses. I've been tempted to try one. I gon't know if they are "bad" lenses or just very old style/image quality.

Buy a cheap magnifing glass and glue it to a lensboard...

Alex's last Little League game...and first hit.

Schmutz a dab of K-Y lubricant around the outside edges of whatever lens you've got and see how that works out..

GKC said:

Schmutz a dab of K-Y lubricant around the outside edges of whatever lens you've got and see how that works out..

Click to expand...

Apply the vaseline to the outside edge of a clear (UV) filter
That way you do not mess up a good lens if you cannot get it clean

You guys are awesome! Ton of ideas here to try out!

ruilourosa said:

Try to build a rapid rectilinear type lens around a shutter... Two +2 diopter close up lenses (simple meniscus) will give you around 250mm.
I built a 600ish out of minolta and leitz achromat close ups with good portrait habilities and made adapters to screw them into a #3 Shutter.

Click to expand...

how did you make your adapters? Do you have lathe? Do you happen to have any example images taken with that DIY lens?

Oh, FYI, here's a test pic of my 42mm dia, 195mm FL positive meniscus lens. 5x7" area cropped from a 8x10 paper negative (scanned and inverted so i can share quickly). shot at about f16, despite the massively larger area than 120 film, it's dreamier looking than what my Holga produces, but it's actually better than i thought. I think maybe using the paper neg with it's non-panchromatic response might help in apparent sharpness. Things looked blurrier when looking at the ground glass. I fully recognize though that at 5x7, even f16 has a pretty shallow DoF at this focus distance.

I think if i want to stick to just a meniscus lens i might just need a bigger one. Looking at the Holga it has a ~20mm diameter lens, to cover a 56mm image. So for a 7" image seems like if this scales linearly then i would need a ~65mm dia or greater lens. Which is easy to find for 250mm (+4 diopter), less easy to find a 190-ish mm lens that's also cheap (aka not some fancy scientific lens). One thing that seems exaggerated on the larger negative versus the 120 film of the holga is the curved focal plane of the PMN lens. I don't know if that's just my particular example or just physics.

Just found a pair of 360mm x 51mm dia achromat lenses on surplus shed, so going to try the DIY rapid rectilinear and see how that comes out too once they arrive!

jimgalli said:

Old projection lenses. They are Petzval types but most are too short to work on 5X7. 4 1/4" is common. 5" is common. (like this one) What you do is just take off the front group and point it at your film. It's an achromatic meniscus doublet. A 5" petzval usually has about an 8 1/2" front group by itself. Finest achromatic meniscus out there. They can be pretty soft though. If you cobble those onto a shutter with an aperture you stop down to taste.

That's about a million dollars of my wasted money finding all that stuff out, for free. Enjoy.

Click to expand...

Do you have any idea what FL the front group of a 4” petzval projector lens would be around?

thanks for all the shared experience BTW!!

Dan McGuire said:

Apply the vaseline to the outside edge of a clear (UV) filter
That way you do not mess up a good lens if you cannot get it clean

Click to expand...

That was one of the classic soft focus tricks. Also ladies nylons stretched over either the front or the back of the lens, burn a hole in the center with a cigarette if you want a sharp center. Saran plastic wrap over the lens can have a wonderful SF effect. All of these techniques are super cheap.

scathontiphat said:

Do you have any idea what FL the front group of a 4” petzval projector lens would be around?

thanks for all the shared experience BTW!!

Click to expand...

My S.W.A.G. would be between 6 1/2 - 7 inches. Another cheap lens to play with is the front light from antique french binoculars. Not the shorty's, the long ones like these. That front group is usually an achromatic meniscus doublet and they range 7 1/2 - 8 1/2" focus. On 5X7 they can get pretty wild at the edges. I've wasted lots of money on those. Wait for the $15 ones. They aren't worth the price on my example. This pic was shot with a 190mm binocular front group on 5X7.

scathontiphat said:

You guys are awesome! Ton of ideas here to try out!



how did you make your adapters? Do you have lathe? Do you happen to have any example images taken with that DIY lens?

Click to expand...

No digital images... Sorry... The adapters were ordered to a mechanic with a lathe yes...

find a folding camera and take the lens off of that, then remove 1 cell, a box camera lens will work well too

Just an update in case any one was interested. Still surfing the 'bay to find some other old lenses to play with, or otherwise destruct in a "constructive" way In the mean time. Doing more tests with the lens elements i've got around.

First up. 195mm simple meniscus (bought from Edmund optics clearance section), when shot at f22-ish and the aperture in front of the lens, it produces some pretty great results. (accidentally grabbed my film holder by the dark slide and caused a nice light leak). When wide open, its actually hard to focus as the image is so soft. But stop down to f22 or smaller and i like it!


then i tried a DIY Rapid Rectilinear from two 360mm achromats from Surplus shed. This is actually surprisingly sharp wide open (f8-ish) in the center for $14 worth of glass gaffer taped to a copal press shutter. Certainly makes focusing easier than the simple meniscus, and it's pretty fun to see how much of a difference that extra symmetric element makes (although slightly apples to orange comparison since my meniscus is a simple single element, not an acrhomat doublet). The thing i don't like about this DIY RR lens is that the field of focus is super duper curved. Even when stopped down, it's much much more curved than the simple meniscus w/ aperture in front... so much so that i don't think it will get a ton of use. Although it does have an interesting look to it that i like. I think the main problem is that these 52mm dia doublets i have don't cover enough of 5x7 for what i like. they'd probably actually do pretty well on 4x5. but i've yet to find a cheap set of 360-400mm FL achromat doublets that are big... seems like it'd be cheaper to just buy a aplanat/rapid-rectilinear that was originally designed to cover 5x7 or greater if i wanted to explore more about how this lens design looks (although a properly designed/constructed Aplanat might look too good for what i'm after!).

at f8-ish:


at f22-ish


anyhow, having ton's of fun exploring the world of not-perfectly-corrected-lenses and can't wait to grab other things to start shooting through! Although from this first set of experiments, i'm definitely keen to try to find a nice achromatic doublet and stick an aperture in front of it!

I think that I would say a typical 150mm Plasmat would not be a good choice for 5x7 cameras. Insufficient image circle for movements.

This is where I picked up my meniscus lens and holder as a Christmas present to myself!
I opted for a 250mm coated lens, with a diameter of 75mm plus the lens holder. They have some much longer focal lengths in this format too. Unfortunately, I still haven't tried mine out yet.
http://www.amazingcameraobscura.co.uk/shop.htm