Wide Angles Both Old and New

[ineffablething]

I was shooting some test shots over the weekend for a new crop of lenses to put up for sale this week. I shot a bunch with a tiny little Gundlach 5x8 Wide Angle. I was shooting on 8x10, just to see what the coverage truly was. Well, you can see by the photo I'm including that it pretty much covers the whole film area. It's pretty sharp corner to corner (when using the waterhouse stop, this pic was shot wide open) and there was no falloff in illumination. Yet the lens itself is about an inch and half long and 2 inches wide and weighs about 6 ounces. Why is it so common to find antique lenses that have tremendous amounts of yet are tiny? All my modern wide angels are HUGE? Just wondering.

 

[MichaelBriggs]

It looks to me like the lens has alot of falloff in illumination. The portion of person in the center of the photo is extra bright -- in this case it enhances the photo, but because the photo doesn't look bad from uneven illumination, we shouldn't say that the lens has no falloff. The outsides edges are darker, especially to the right. How much of this is from the lighting of the scene and how much is uneven illumination from the lens? It hard to say. A good way to test a lens for illumination falloff is to take a picture of an evenly illuminated surface, such as a wall receiving uniform natural light. The most stringent test is to prefocus on infinity, then point the lens at the evenly illuminated surface.

 

[ineffablething]

Well, she was laying in front of a window, and the areas of falloff on the right side are just due to those areas of the room being dark. Plus, I always burn down the corners of my prints to some extent. My only point was that I am surprised how such a tiny lens can cover so much in comparison to modern wide angles. Even my relatively younger 159mm Wollensak is much bigger,even taking into account it's shutter. Or maybe my head is completely up my ass since noone else has weighed in on this.

cheers,

Me

 

[David A. Goldfarb]

There are a few reasons for this, but one of them is that the modern lenses are usually considerably faster and they need to be more complex to be well corrected at wider apertures. The old wideangle designs are often f:12.5 or f:14, and modern lenses are f:8, 5.6, and 4.5.

 

[Jim Noel]

For this type of image you need not worry about fall off.

The lens worked very well for the shot. Is it good for a landscape, possibly not.

If you don't want to keep it for this special use, you may send it to me.

Jim

 

[Sparky]

The lens worked very well for the shot. Is it good for a landscape, possibly not.

OR - it could be FAR superior for landscape than any modern-day lens. Depends on what kind of 'look' you're after. Different strokes for different folks...

 

[df cardwell]

Shooting this lens, close up, and with an expressive image rather than a literal image, you're fine. Cool.

If you shot a sky, you'de see the falloff for sure. And if you shot a 'chrome, the edges would be black !

The trick of the biogon, super angulons, and all, is to re-direcr light into the corners, which is kind of a miracle.

The cool thing is that we have a hundred 130 years of lenses to choose from for our pictures.

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