A favorite lens of mine is a Vivitar Series 1, a great beast of glass and steel built in the tradition of tanks and battleships, impressive in look, and perhaps illustrious in brand: the mighty 28-85/2.8.
By comparison, when Nikon decided to put out a modest 35-70/2.8 as their super zoom, Vivitar had not coward and went all 28mm.
It used to be permanently affixed to my FM2N. The poor camera looked as if it was prepared to do war correspondence, MD12, huge zoom lens, black leather strap…. It always sounded like an F2, with that mechanical shutter. It weight a good portion of it too, with all the AA batteries required for the drive.
The camera has gone back to my first love of it, no attachments, a colorful hippie strap, and a tiny 28/2.8 the size of an expresso cup. Only a Leica is smaller and lighter.
But to the lens, it serves a Df digital.
The lens is soft and dreamy wide open. Corners are soft too, and get properly sharp at around 45mm stopped down. And yes, stray light will make it flair, and strong specular highlights will produce CA, but I love it.
My solution? Close it down on bright light, avoid shooting into the sun, use a polarize filter, go wide indoors, where is tight and darker, and use bounce flash to sharpen things up, but do use the softness for great ambiance and portraits.
I don’t want the impression the lens is always soft. It sharpens up at f/8 just fine, full center.
The slightly soft corners, and whatever vignetting there is, only contributes to keeping the viewer’s attention away from the edges and into the center of the image.
That’s how are eyes work too.
In the darkroom I was always taught to darken the corners a bit, to imitate that.
Great lens.
I like these old Vivitars. The offered a lot, at very affordable prices.
Kind regards Xk!
