David A. Goldfarb
Moderator
While Honolulu may seem off the beaten track for industry shows, we were lucky to have a visit from Les Zellan, owner of Cooke Optics, organized by Hawaii Camera, the local rental house, which happens to be a short walk from where I live. It didn't seem to have been widely publicized, but they had a pretty full room--about 25 people, mostly cinematographers, but there was one other guy there interested in Cooke's lenses for large format.
Mr. Zellan started in the industry as a lighting designer, worked in rental and sales in New York, and came into contact with Cooke when he started selling Aaton cameras (not realizing at first that he was broaching a gentleman's agreement his boss had with Arri). Cooke made one of the only zooms that worked well on Aaton's Super16 format camera, and that and the awkward relationship with the boss led to his move to Cooke, which was apparently successful enough that he bought the company in 1998, the era of the introduction of the S4 prime lenses for cine cameras.
His wife, Barbara, is the company historian, and I got the impression that her research has been very important for Cooke's introduction of its two offerings for large format, the XVa triple-convertible for 8x10", based on the Cooke Series XV that Ansel Adams used, and the PS945 soft focus lens for 4x5", based on the Pinkham-Smith Visual Quality IV lens.
Mr. Zellan gave a brief history of Taylor, Taylor, Hobson/Cooke's role in the development of mainly cine lenses and led us through the manufacturing process, showing slides and passing around examples of a lens element at various stages from glass blank to a coated, edged, blacked element, and discussed Cooke's design philosophy, at many points differentiating Cooke's approach from that of it's major competitor, Zeiss.
The Cooke design philosophy takes into account the needs of cinematographers/DPs, who are mainly interested in the look of the image, assistants who are handling the lenses most closely, and the needs of the owners/rental houses, who want solid gear that is easy to maintain.
The warm look of Cooke lenses, he said, dates back to the early days of TTH, when lenses were optimized for wavelengths well into the blue range, where the film was most sensitive, being less optimized for green, and letting red fall where it may. Zeiss takes the opposite approach, optimizing for red and letting blue fall where it may, and he said that this in part accounts for the reputation of Cooke for a warm look, and Zeiss for a cool look. He's not an engineer, and neither am I, but it makes intuitive sense to me that if you allow for a little glow at the red end of the spectrum, you'll get a warmer look on color film.
He also said that when they are assembled, Cooke lenses are balanced visually using a traditional lens projector and resolution targets rather than an MTF projector, optimized for the center to reflect the way that viewers look at a moving image, rather than a still image where the viewer has more time to inspect the corners of the frame. One could choose, for instance, to reduce the resolution in the center of the frame to get a flatter field with more uniform resolution from center to the corners, but it's an aesthetic choice to accept the field curvature to differentiate the way we look at a movie screen as compared with a still image.
Cooke distance and iris scales are customized for each individual lens, and they are cammed for uniform spacing across the range, so all the distances aren't scrunched together toward infinity, and they can have marked distances that can be measured with a tape on the set farther out than other lenses. I handled the 50mm S/4 on the cart in the photo, and it is exceptionally smooth, mechanically.
Most Cooke primes are designed to focus as a unit without floating elements (the more complicated designs being at the extremes of the range, like 12mm or the 300mm/f:2.8), which may mean sacrificing resolution or accepting distortion at the ends of the focus range, but keeps dust out of the lens and makes them more rugged, more reliable at temperature extremes, and easier to service.
Cooke lenses use co-evaporation to apply all coatings in one step, rather than multicoating in layers, and he claimed that this produced a harder coating with similar anti-reflective properties to the coatings of the competitors.
Cooke also uses both CNC and traditional polishing, and Zellan said that for the most demanding tasks and tightest tolerances, the human master polishers were better.
Setting aside topics such as anamorphic lenses, metadata capture, and inertial tracking, which are less of interest on APUG, I asked about how Cooke got into making new lenses for large format and what the future may hold from Cooke for still photography.
Mr. Zellan said that from a manufacturing perspective, part of the impetus came from the problem of making use of production downtime that may come while waiting for glass blanks (Cooke uses about 100 types of glass, he said) that may only be made once per year. Large format still lenses like the PS945 are less technically demanding than, say, a 10X zoom with 21 elements, so the elements for a year's production run could be ground and polished in a few weeks and assembled during another production lull. The decision to make the PS945 came from Barbara's research into soft-focus lenses (and he confirmed that the soft focus attachment for the S/4 lenses is based on the technology in the PS945). The XVa was a logical choice, because it was a lens of good reputation that they already owned the design for, and they only needed to update it for modern materials.
As to the future of still photography lenses at Cooke, Mr. Zellan had no specifics or promises to offer, but he did admit to being intrigued by the fact that Cooke made some lenses for Leica shortly after WWII, so Leicaphiles with similar interest might consider a lobbying effort. I also gleaned from this discussion that if we had an interest in other LF lenses, that the greatest likelihood of success might come from looking into the history of TTH/Cooke and seeing what they might already own designs and special tooling for. I was very impressed to see the respect that Les Zellan has for the history of the company, and that's something we can benefit from.