Petzval designs, soft-focus, pictorialist lenses… Whatever you wish for. Innovations from the middle of the 20th century and from the depths of the century before. Back then, glass was more glassy and brass was more brassy. Nobody cared about size or weight. Character and bokeh were what mattered, and there is plenty of both here. Leave your pixel-peeping obsession at home and prepare for the perfectly imperfect. These lenses don’t capture photographs. They paint them.
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Dallmeyer Bergheim
The first lens in history deliberately designed for soft-focus photography. A grand claim—but really just the distilled essence of several equally fascinating and thoroughly tangled threads behind its creation. Where did it come from? Why did it come to be? Why is it so peculiar—and, most importantly, what does it actually shoot like?
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Bausch & Lomb Portrait Unar
I’ve got a unique optical layout and a silhouette so distinctive you can spot me from a distance. My construction is absurdly complex and notoriously temperamental. I’m a portrait virtuoso, lurking modestly in the shadows but towering over many of my peers like a smug diva. I am Unar. Portrait Unar.
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Dallmeyer 3B
They were forged early in 1873 and 1883 by old masters in faraway Dallmeyer. One remained in its island homeland, the other travelled to the Apennine Peninsula — yet both ultimately found their way into the hands of men with distinctly refined photographic taste. A scarcely believable century and a half later, they were reunited in the hands of a man of equally voracious optical appetite — and idleness most certainly does not await them.
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Hermagis Portrait
Like a broken-winged swan calls wistfully to a spring... I was so lonely for portraits. The birds are already screeching, the flowers will soon start pestering with their pollen and in the meantime, I’m frantically polishing brass for the season. One of these cherished glassy tubes is one that carries portraits right in its name and lineage. Here comes the illustrious Hermagis Portrait!
