A Pinkham Tale.

jimgalli · Dec 13, 2015

la puta negra deuce

It's been a slow year for me and I haven't done a page of soft focus pics in quite some time. So it's time to break the silence I hope.

The image at the top links to a page I've created at my web pages with images done by a one off Pinkham lens. The only one in existence as far as anyone knows. It is a pre-production prototype Pinkham Bi-Quality lens, 16" f5. The story about it is at my page.

also posted at lfforum for my friends there.

http://tonopahpictures.0catch.com/Pinkham-Smith/Bi-Quality/Sixteen/Prototype16Bi-Quality.html

Richard Man · Dec 13, 2015

Hot d*mn. Nice find Mr. Galli!

Alan Gales · Dec 14, 2015

You can use a rare or common lens, Jim. I always love your images!

I also enjoy the subject matter!

jimgalli · Dec 14, 2015

Thank you, both.

Pioneer · Dec 14, 2015

Jim you always amaze us with something unexpected.

Thank you for this early Xmas gift.

JPJackson · Dec 15, 2015

Excellent images and history/story!

removed account4 · Dec 15, 2015

thank you jim !
quite an amazing story,
and beautiful photography as usual

thanks for the early xmas present !
john

jimgalli · Dec 15, 2015

Thanks!

mhcfires · Dec 18, 2015

Thank you for both the story behind the lenses and the wonderful results.

m

jimgalli · Dec 18, 2015

I found the Weston reference to la puta negra. It is in Charis' book, Through Another Lens, and she says Edward named the 1938 Ford sedan la puta negra, (the black whore) because he said any car that was in association with them must have a checkered character. She says soon they changed it to "Heimy" because it took too long to explain the other name.

There's a picture of their car in Golden Canyon, and indeed, it's the cheaper standard model, like mine, theirs being a tudor sedan and mine a coupe of course. I wonder if they bought the V8-60 model like mine in order to save even more $$.

Simon Benton · Dec 21, 2015

Your photographs are amazing. Wish I could capture soft focus the way you do but I will keep on trying. Thanks for the inspiration!

HiHoSilver · Dec 21, 2015

As I commented on your current post of the truck interior, that lens is quite special. Reading the story makes it all the more so. I don't know if the 14" version had similar rendering qualities, but it would argue Mr. Pinkham knew a thing or two about glass.

jimgalli · Dec 21, 2015

HiHoSilver said:
As I commented on your current post of the truck interior, that lens is quite special. Reading the story makes it all the more so. I don't know if the 14" version had similar rendering qualities, but it would argue Mr. Pinkham knew a thing or two about glass.

Thanks for the comment. Indeed the 14" acts identically to this 16". I'm assuming they were thinking more of market potential than trying to do anything cutting edge. These lenses are a mid century revival of a design that had been marketed in the teens through the '30's successfully by this man's uncle, also Pinkham who is the person we associate with the best of the soft focus lenses of the turn of the last century. He actually DID know something about glass.

That Pinkham hand ground his earliest designs such that each one had a personality different from the others. By the 1920's though (late 1910's?) they landed on this design, the fourth series, and they were factory ground and mostly identical in how they worked. And the design was not Pinkhams. I think it actually is credited to Nicola Perscheid. I'll oversimplify in saying it is sort of an "uncorrected" rapid rectilinear design. Not hard to produce. When Cooke Optical decided to again revive a modern soft focus design a few years ago, they didn't revive their own soft focus lens of the 1920's and '30's, a rather expensive and difficult design, they re-made the Pinkham "Visual Quality". The old fourth series Pinkham design.

A Pinkham Tale.

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