Struss lenses

johnielvis · Jan 31, 2014

After seeing the prices these things command and reading the history of them, it appears that these are really nothing special. Apparently Struss was the Reinhold of his day and sold meniscus lenses. Struss made his interchangeable and had a rotating aperture but Reinhold makes 'em WAY bigger and for more coverage.

What is needed is a struss vs Reinhold lens shootout--anyone with a struss shoot something and then shoot the same thing with a Reinhold lens (or maybe a lens from a pair of reading glasses--same thing, right?).

The results are likely the same, but there's no way to find out unless one of the struss owners tries it.

This has probably been done, and the results probably indicated that the struss is same as any 3 for 10 dollar reader eyeglasses, therefore, the results were never published by the struss owners. Just a suspicion.

Any takers on the challenge? I'll bet not--the struss owners do not want to reduce the perceived magick of their lenses.

INVESTMENT: buy the reinhold lenses--save them for retirement when they are legendary as the struss lenses.

gandolfi · Jan 31, 2014

Oh Dear...

Did you propose this on LF forum? (where the Struss owners are - and Reinhold for that matter..)

I think there's a world apart in the two lenses.. at least from what I have seen up till now.

I dont have a Struss (not rich or lucky enough. yes: I want one!) and I dont need a Reinhold, so I can't make the shootout...

LJH · Jan 31, 2014

johnielvis said:
After seeing the prices these things command and reading the history of them, it appears that these are really nothing special. Apparently Struss was the Reinhold of his day.

Nice sledge of Reinhold and his lenses.

jp498 · Jan 31, 2014

Jim Galli has plenty of comparison images, but they are not scientifically done.

I did a spencer port-land vs reinhold vs veritar (coated verito essentially) comparison a couple years ago at Russ Young/Tillman Crane pictorialism workshop in VA.

From what I've seen (I use the reinhold a great deal) and a verito more than most, the reinhold creates sort of a charcoal textured image at f8 and at brigher apertures has additional glow and diffusion. The verito is glowy at f4/4.5 and goes quickly to sharp as you stop down and never charcoally but sometimes buttery. The spencer was sort of in the middle. Going the other way a Holga is diffused but not glowy in normal use and doesn't have sharpness that a verito has.

One thing the Struss had going for it was that it was flocked internally which was supposedly uncommon and would allow you to have more predicatble contrast.

Ultimately, using these lenses is not about which one does what in comparison to the other like we do with tessars or plasmats, but was more about having one and using it extensively and wringing the best images out of it, showing the moods and atmosphere the photographer intended predictably.

jp498 · Jan 31, 2014

johnielvis said:
Any takers on the challenge? I'll bet not--the struss owners do not want to reduce the perceived magick of their lenses.

INVESTMENT: buy the reinhold lenses--save them for retirement when they are legendary as the struss lenses.

Struss owners do not use their lenses. (I'm sure there are exceptions which prove the rule).

If I had one, it would probably not go outside much. I like something I can use in the rain/snow and keep in my truck and not worry about hurting the value of.

Now if I managed to use it to take world class photos and then died and people wanted the lens because it belonged to me and did magic for me, then that would restore it's value, but I'd be dead and woudn't care.

DREW WILEY · Jan 31, 2014

Some of these lenses were individually hand-"tuned" to give the desired result, so are not necessarily identical one to the other.

johnielvis · Jan 31, 2014

doubful that the struss lenses were hand tuned--they were made to be interchangable--they were made to be cheap and economical according to the ads-this kind of obviates any intensive hand work. the most expensive part of the struss lenses was the barrel and iris apparently.

What would be nice is if some struss owners would just take their mensicus lens glass to the optician to have the curvatures measured--then release the two curvatures to the public---then we can all make our own struss lenses--or for current struss owners, they can have the complete set of focal lengths originally advertised for the single barrel.

But that will never happen--who will ever buy a struss lens when the "secret" is public info and can be had from optics shops cheaply--a wise chinese man may take his struss and make a "sinostruss" that is superior and way cheaper.

Reinhold lenses benefit from flocking the inside--all lenses do. It's trivial (but a pain sometimes) to flock these lenses yourself.

DREW WILEY · Jan 31, 2014

As I understand it, there were two completely different series of Struss - a mass-produced economy version and the real deal. I'm don't shoot
soft-focus lenses so am admittedly no expert about this. But I am aware that this alleged difference is something which was been warned about to those surfing the "cult lens" postings with extravagant pricing. I'd personally check with Jim Galli about this.

johnielvis · Jan 31, 2014

never heard that there were two grades of struss lenses---post a link to any info on that if you have it-anyone??? galli says is not sufficient--particularly since he's peddling the things. an independent source...old ads? someting?

johnielvis · Jan 31, 2014

AHHHH. Look here--a doctoral dissertation on pictorial lenses. Says struss is a simple meniscus with no mods--this guy apparently TALKED to struss. Search for struss in the pdf of it.

http://hdl.handle.net/10023/505

so there it is--buy yourself a reinhold for the ultimate struss images.

There's a note in the paper about a technique that struss used with his pictorial lens to get the results nobody else can get today--he shot three exposures at three apertures! so you get soft and sharp! so easy!

Get a reinhold or a pair of eyeglass cheaters--or a close up diopter! shoot with three apertures and you're an instant MASTER!

gandolfi · Feb 1, 2014

Dead Link Removed

Xmas · Feb 1, 2014

If you want to do this yourself...

You need to find a friendly eye glasses optician supplier and pick a high refractive glass blank of the shelf with the correct focal length, i.e. normal for your camera. If you have an old barrel he should grind it to size for you.

The higher refractive index will control the abberations as the curved surfaces will have larger radia and it is the (spherical) radia that control/generate the abberations. Id assume the supplier would only have glass with low dispersion for the refractive index, so shooting in mono you should be ok.

The supplier will have them hard coated so cleaning wont cause the same damage, and transmission should be good.

The optic should give a more clinical rendition than an old lens.

Noel
P.S. I'm resisting the GAS force to buy a 8x10... just

johnielvis · Feb 1, 2014

gandolfi said:
Dead Link Removed

ahhh. Cameraeccentric. the gift that keeps on giving. Lots of undiscovered stuff there. this was interesting read. However what I was after was a shootout between the struss meniscus and the reinhold meniscus or a simple eyeglass/ closeup filter meniscus--but the SAME type of same model/same pose/same lighting.

outwest · Feb 1, 2014

Looks like the test would have to be done on the ortho film for which the Struss was designed.

goamules · Feb 1, 2014

Sounds like a lot of sour grapes. Or some kind of paid advertisement.

I love my Struss, and yes, I do shoot it. I haven't shot a Reinhold, doesn't he just buy whatever surplus shed happens to have? How does he even know what he's using, besides focal length? Is each lens in one focal length the same, or each a "one off" based on whatever Surplusshed.com had at the time?

No matter, Karl Struss had a fantastic background shooting with the early Pictorialists, then went on to Hollywood to wide acclaim for his soft focus work. In a nutshell: he knew what he was doing. And didn't troll around criticizing what he knew little about.
Out.....

johnielvis · Feb 1, 2014

Very scientific conclusions, those.

I'm going with the Dr's. dissertation--he KNOWS what he's talking about--and he interviewed struss--and he did some real research on struss and others:

Hans Watzek, an art teacher in Vienna who was also a committed amateur photographer.
In 1891 he showed his large portraits made with a simple planoconvex lens to the Vienna
Camera Club and soon thereafter made “extraordinarily attractive”8 photographs by
combining the pinhole and the plano-convex lens, the long exposures however being a
serious detriment to widespread adoption. In between these two configurations, he also
experimented with the simple meniscus lens which would see commercial production in
two decades as the Struss Pictorial lens.

further

The exception was Karl Struss. His Struss Pictorial lens was almost precisely Watzek’s design. Struss
read German and it is tantalizing to wonder if he read any of Watzek’s experiments in the various German
and Austrian photographic journals. Since Struss lived in New York at the time, might Struss have read
copies in the possession of Alfred Stieglitz, who was fluent in German and likely subscribed to German and
Austrian photo-club journals?

Karl Struss informed the author of a similar method that he used
c.1910 by changing the aperture between multiple exposures. He used three consecutive apertures on each
image. Struss, in his patent application, also listed lining the tube with black velvet as a way to reduce flare. It
seems too great a coincidence that Struss used two of Rejlander’s methods. There was also a mechanical method
that operated on the same principle, Taylor’s Patent attachment, which spun a disk with eight apertures of
varying diameters in front of the lens during exposure.

Looks like Struss, like all great artists, steals his "original" designs as well as his ideas.

It looks like case closed on this. Simple meniscus--stolen design ideas--lens marketed as a bargain "silver bullet" to rubes using his fame from his professional work to make an easy buck.

OH...but Struss wouldn't possibly use his fame to shill crap, would he?

Apparently he would and did.

Still would be nice to see how the two simple meniscus lenses compare--just to give some of the average joe's around here an affordable alternative.

johnielvis · Feb 1, 2014

O M G!!!!

they WERE common cheater eyeglass lenses!!!!! from the paper:

Watzek experimented with combining the two.
Gradually he made the pinhole aperture larger and larger until only the lens was forming
the image. In 1891 he “presented to the Viennese Camera Club, portraits of large heads,
taken with the aid only of an ordinary spectacle lens,”12 the climax of his search for an
artistic lens.

this is the design that struss copied---"ordinary spectacle lens"

Who says the emperor has no clothes? Good thing this ain't north korea and kim jong un don't like struss lenses like basketball.

Newt_on_Swings · Feb 2, 2014

Haha this is some fun reading. Would make a nice little documentary that I would totally watch.

MDR · Feb 2, 2014

This was the time of the pictoralists everyone and his mother did experiments with meniscus lenses. "the simple meniscus lens which would see commercial production in two decades as the Struss Pictorial lens." Sorry but this shows that the guy choose to ignore a lot of lens history in order to create his flawed hypothesis. Simple meniscus lenses were the mostly widely used lenses since the invention of photography and saw commercial production from nearly day one of photography. The sharpness was a result of aperture and less of lens correction in the early days at least (single and double meniscus lenses were sold by practically every optician and lens mfg.). Julia Margaret Cameron for instance used amongst other things single meniscus lenses to get her softfocus effect again more than 20 years before Hans Watzek.
And even if he sold cheap lenses as artistic tool it's not the emperors new clothes since people bought them to obtain a certain effect and get a uniform quality without having to create a lens themselves, all these things were provided by the Struss lens.

johnielvis · Feb 2, 2014

Those are very challenging assertations. But nothing is offered to back it up other than what the reader is supposed to assume is a vast knowledge of pictorial lenses?

by the way, if you actually READ the paper you will see that the Dr. researched julia margaret cameron. His facts contradict the assertion that cameron used meniscus lenses. The Dr. researches cameron's equipment and demonstrates that she used only SHARP lenses for all her images--a jamin cone and a dallmeyer rapid rectilinear--she MADE her images blurry.

At least READ the paper before you go off repeating old wives tales as truth. If you have proof to refute the dissertation, then, please post it. Thus far, here have been no posts refuting the facts in the paper other than half baked opinions gleaned from legend based on "galli says".

johnielvis · Feb 2, 2014

Here's more from the paper about how "special" them struss lenses actually were and what to do to fix their shortcomings:

Cheap to manufacture, they were difficult to use, “such a lens
possessing all possible errors, and giving, as a result of its optical defects, a very soft
quality of definition.”12 The chemical and visual focus did not coincide thus an
adjustment had to be made after the visual focus. Because a simple meniscus has
significant chromatic aberration, the “soft quality” was exaggerated after panchromatic
emulsions came into common use, unless, however, “a ray filter {yellow equivalent to a
modern K-2} and color sensitive plates are used, the lens is rendered for all practical
purposes completely achromatic and no correction need be made after focusing.”13
Regardless of the film’s spectral sensitivity, “lenses of the single series have from 50 to
60 per cent correction, and therefore show more halo around the lights than doublets of
75 per cent correction, so that they must be stopped down more to get rid of the flare or
used in a duller light.”14 The Struss Pictorial is the only significant lens of this type.15

no wonder struss had to have special demonstrations and classes to show how to properly use his great silver bullet and still it didn't work for anyone but struss. All hype.

This is not to knock meniscus lenses--they do have their place and have a unique look. Meniscus lenses can produce great results if you know what you're doing with them. However, the cold, hard fact remains that a struss lens is nothing more than a bargain basement meniscus in a machined barrel with an iris.

After this gets to be public knowledge, the "mint" struss lenses on ebay will multiply--there will now be struss lenses available with "the RARE complete sets of focal lengths". You thought the ripoffs were bad now...just wait till the crooks get a hold of this knowledge. All they have to do is claim it's original--not even "original" owners will refute them for fear that their lenses will be shown to be nothing but regular old meniscus lenses and lose their value--they will be complicit in the scams. Who knows--most of these original owners probably got scammed themselves--after all, they really don't know what lens is in that struss barrel, now, do they?

MDR · Feb 2, 2014

Julia Margaret Cameron used different lenses in her career including sharp Dallmeyer RR and Petzval a well known fact as Dallmeyer used her for promotion. She also writes that she used the lenses slightly out-of.-focus again no great research necessary she wrote it herself.

I still don't see it as the emperors new clothes the Struss did what it was advertised to do. Also the Struss like all special lenses is not suited for photographing everything, one has to think before using this lens. As you've said he provided a lens with Iris diaphragm so one could controll the amount of unsharpness, halo etc...
Would I say it is something special yes just like any other meniscus based lens, would I pay the stupid amount they go for no. But the same thing applies to say Pre-war leica lenses that sometime command huge sums but sharpness wise are no better than the cheapest modern lens.

jp498 · Feb 2, 2014

johnielvis said:
Those are very challenging assertations. But nothing is offered to back it up other than what the reader is supposed to assume is a vast knowledge of pictorial lenses?

by the way, if you actually READ the paper you will see that the Dr. researched julia margaret cameron. His facts contradict the assertion that cameron used meniscus lenses. The Dr. researches cameron's equipment and demonstrates that she used only SHARP lenses for all her images--a jamin cone and a dallmeyer rapid rectilinear--she MADE her images blurry.

At least READ the paper before you go off repeating old wives tales as truth. If you have proof to refute the dissertation, then, please post it. Thus far, here have been no posts refuting the facts in the paper other than half baked opinions gleaned from legend based on "galli says".

Russ Young based his paper on what he can find solid evidence for. He's got MUCH more for assertions and understandings that are not as easily proven and aren't included in the thesis. Makes for very interesting conversation if one likes photo history.

MDR · Feb 2, 2014

What happens if you split a RR which is possible since it's a symmetrical design right a double meniscus or doublet so one can't say wether she did or did not use a meniscus (doublet).

winterclock · Feb 2, 2014

A meniscus is a single element lens, an RR is a lens with four elements in two goups. If you only use one element it is an achromat, not a meniscus.

Struss lenses

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