The Ultimate Cooke...wish I could afford it!

[jonw]

Here is the Ultimate Cooke Lens in a Betax Shutter. Maybe a nice APUGer can win this and then....share it! If nothing else, I hope an APUGer can win it and at least post pics!

http://cgi.ebay.com/Original-Cooke-...585189027QQcategoryZ30076QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

 

[David A. Goldfarb]

As long as we're talking about unaffordable lenses, I'd rather have the current version.

 

[jonw]

I know what you mean David!

Jay, I agree, except I think we will have more fun finding out what our lenses will actually produce, while buying more film. In fact, I found another goody when I was digging through my lense bag while reading Jay Allen's Soft Portrait lenses book...I discovered one of my odd lens which I had not previously identified is in fact a Goerz Series II f6.3 Kalostat Spectral Diffussion Lens. We'lll have to try it with the turners, veritos et al. Hope to slip into the studio this week (sanity break) and at least try some more SW Pottery/Navajo Rug shots. You got anytime for shooting?

 

[Pinholemaster]

I prefer my Cooke XVa (ss#065)

It's nice to have a historical lens, but . . ..

 

[photobum]

Gee, look's just like my Wollensak 13-20-25. Did AA carve his name on the back?

 

[jimgalli]

Don't want to pop your bubbles as this is a magnificent lens but it has far less in common with Protar's and Wolly 1a's than it does with an obscure lens from 90 - 100 years ago called the Wollensak Royal Anastigmat. It is similar in it's 2,2 + 2,2 arrangement to the Royal. This Cooke has an air space in the center of each 4 elements in each group. The protar and wolly each hvae 4 cemented elements. The Gundlach has 5 cemented elements which is often troublesome.

 

[Steve Hamley]

It is nice to have a lens that everyone admires and that famous photographers used, but I've never been able to convince myself that either the Cooke XV or the 250mm WF Ektar were worth what they bring these days. Certainly if the Cooke gets near a kilobuck the smart thing would be to put that money towards the new version in a modern synched shutter, and a 240mm Computar or Kowa plasmat performs as well as the WF ektar in a smaller and more modern shutter.

The lenses used by St. Ansel IMO bring far in excess of what they're really worth, and we forget that he and other photographers of historical note used a lot of lenses. Some of the pictures I admire most in "The Making of 40 Photographs" were made with a Dagor, and apparently a rather old uncoated one of "about 250mm". Maybe the Cooke and the WF Ektar are high dollar because they're identifiable; Ansel having mentioned them by name.

But another person mentioned that most photographers then, as now, used the best lenses they could afford at the time (pictoralists notwithstanding, then or now). I also suspect that once they had something decent in the focal lengths they wanted, they didn't think about it much anymore unless they had problems.

Steve

 

[David A. Goldfarb]

The 250 WF Ektar gets what it does, I think, because of its huge image circle. It's not the sharpest or contrastiest lens in that range but for architecture with an 8x10" it solves some problems that other lenses can't handle.