#8 Kodak Portrait 305mm f4.5
When you hold it in your hand, one would have the feeling that despite its impressive 30.5cm lenght, something is still seemingly missing. A tube with a single piece of glass and a lot of aperture blades just exposed to the world. It almost gives the impression that it was forged by old masters from a toilet paper roll and grandma’s reading magnifier. However, as folk wisdom says: don’t judge a lens by the number of optical elements.
We learned what are those pictorialisms in my previous article here. However, among all the confusion about knee menisci, the fact that I like it soft and where one can use vaseline, one would miss the most essential information - what is the initial impulse, who is the cornerstone around which the temple of my photographic ingenuity has been built. Well, it came like a bolt from the blue and it and it was nobody else but Mr. Portrait Kodak himself.
The design is not a very usual type - there is a meniscus optical member at the back (see below), in front of which is an aperture and that's it. So to the uninitiated, the lens might appear incomplete, without the front lens group. The downside are the blades, tricky little metal fuckers, mechanically unprotected from the harsh world around (which is the same with glass, well, that's what we have caps and filters for). The advantage is that the lens body and even the blades themselves act as a lenshood to the rear element and there is no need to mount anything else.
Along with the barrel version (the version without a shutter), there are also Kodaks in shutter (Ilex Universal No. 5 Synchro), which are limited to the slightly slower f4.8 aperture due to the size of the shutter hole. There is also a rarer longer sibling, the Kodak Portrait 405mm f4.5, which can be found only as a shuterless version.
- The meniscus lens consists of a single lens with a maximum of two cemented elements. The simpler is just a pinhole camera. You can get a basic overview here.
- This design is used for various purposes in different fields - mainly microscopy and astronomy. In photography, however, these lenses are often known for their relaxed photographic morals that would make members of the f/64 group really, really mad.
- If such lenses already have an aperture, its use regulates (suppresses) the degree of softness. Around f8 - f11 you are already brutally killing the character of the lens and it becomes indifferent which one you use. More on the different types of correction here.
I've flirted with soft outputs before, when I was frantically spinning the rear group of my Dallmaer and trying to get in shape my ultra-mega-rare Crown (ha, you won't find anything about it! Maybe there will be an article in the future). Compared to Kodak, though, these are still very sophisticatedly restrained lenses even for maximum SF. It was only Kodak that showed me what pictorialism is about and what I was missing out on with my arrogance. Yes, I also had a dark (sharp?) ages when I blew my nose in disdain over soft photos as "stupidly focused photos where the photographer was as blind as a bat." Well, let it serve me right for looking down on my younger self. Or rather, I'm still the same stupid, but in a completely different way.
The lens has a very wild background in the backlight, full of bubbles and with the right background even some swirl effect. It handles overexposured scenes, contrasts between light and shadow and backlighting very well (these conditions will accentuate the shallow depth of field and amplify the fantasy effect). Otherwise, everything is soft, creamy, dreamily overexposed - a true flag-bearer in its field. The lens comfortably covers the 8x10" format (the 405mm version one format larger), but the sharpness and commonality of the image drops noticeably towards the edges - if this is not to your liking, I recommend placing the subject of interest more in the middle of the scene, or using the lens on the 5x7" format (and the 405mm on the 8x10"). This is useful for head-and-shoulders style portraiture where you can use a longer focal length.
Portraiture is, if you wouldn't have guessed it from the name, the powerful aspect of Kodak. He wasn't one of the favorite portrait lenses of old Hollywood for no reason - the soft touch smoothed out the lines and made the young ones shine. But beware, here it is advisable to choose rather subtle, soft lighting.
But whatever, just be hard on yourself and shoot soft.