[HN Gopher] Radioactive Lenses and Everything About Them
___________________________________________________________________
Radioactive Lenses and Everything About Them
Author : prismatic
Score : 22 points
Date : 2021-08-04 16:06 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (lenslegend.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lenslegend.com)
| sprafa wrote:
| wow this is mind blowing I own several of these and I had no
| idea.
| dangerboysteve wrote:
| I own the exact Minolta Rokkor lens in the photo but I knew of
| its radioactive nature. I picked it up on eBay over 10 years
| ago.
| Sunspark wrote:
| There is a possibility I might have one, I'll have to look for it
| sometime to check, I have never actually used it because the
| camera it came with is a cloth shutter and isn't accurate anymore
| and I doubt there's anyone who reconditions 1960s slrs to like-
| new anymore. The thing about these lenses is that they are manual
| focus. I wear glasses. Realistically, am I ever going to want to
| use a manual focus lens again? Likely not, and my assumption is
| that this probably applies to most people.
|
| This is not the first time I have read about old lenses making
| for a more pleasing picture, but I have to question, how true is
| that really? And how much of it is just expectation of how a
| photo should look? People today are accustomed to accurate colors
| and in-focus photos. They probably wouldn't care for photos taken
| with vintage lenses as much.
| grawprog wrote:
| When I was in school, we had a teacher who was really into
| photography. He liked to show us collections of slides of
| photos he'd taken throughout the 70's, 80's and 90's with his
| vintage camera equipment.
|
| Honestly, we all groaned every time he'd bust out a slide reel,
| but the pictures were beautiful. Some of the best pictures I've
| ever seen. I'm not a huge photography buff or anything, I've
| learned some of the basics of photography, but that's about it.
| I'm really not even sure why, but, they were just nice to look
| at. Not just the composition of the pictures, but the colours
| and the saturation, they just felt good to the eye. I'm not
| really sure how exactly to describe it.
| Sunspark wrote:
| I'm thinking zoom factor may have played a role.
|
| 50-58mm lens with a 35mm film negative is not far from what
| you see yourself. Lenses that are wide angle (e.g. 28mm) make
| things look farther away and distorted, and lens that are
| telephoto compresses things and makes them look closer. A lot
| of photos taken today are "wide".
|
| It's true about the colors though. Kodachrome and Velvia had
| very distinct looks.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > This is not the first time I have read about old lenses
| making for a more pleasing picture, but I have to question, how
| true is that really?
|
| Partly myth partly reality.
|
| Older lenses used simpler designs, simpler coatings and simpler
| glass elements. These simpler designs mean that these lenses
| have poor optical performances, they're usually (at wide
| apertures) only sharp in the center, have more vignetting,
| chromatic aberrations, spherical aberrations, optical
| vignetting in the out of focus areas, they can flare, have less
| contrast, &c. all of these element can give a distinct look to
| the images created by a lens.
|
| New lenses are designed through computers to correct all these
| aberrations to offer edge to edge sharpness, no vignetting, &c.
| but at the same time it makes them look very boring (to some)
| from an artistic standpoint.
|
| The recording medium also has a big importance, film, be it
| b&w, color negatives or color positives all produced different
| looks that we now instinctively associate to certain eras. The
| color science behind these is pretty complex and very
| subjective, hence the large number of different film emulsions
| that existed back when film was mainstream.
| sunshineforever wrote:
| This made me extremely excited that they had discovered how to
| reflect gamma particles or something like that.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-08-05 23:01 UTC)