![]() Special lenses were made for the pictorial fashion of the time, some of which have become legendary and fetch high prices even now. ![]() Even Edward Weston made soft-focus images before he decided absolute clarity was his thing. If you aren’t familiar with any photographers from the periods I’ve mentioned, I would urge you to look at the work of Baron Adolph de Meyer, Clarence H White, Gertrude Käsebier, Edward Steichen, Heinrich Kühn, Josef Sudek, George Hurrell, Margaret Watkins, and Anne Brigman. Photographers of the Linked Ring, the Photo-Secessionists, pictorial photographers and portrait photographers from Hollywood’s golden era, knew that certain lenses could produce outstanding results when used in a way that exploited their optical faults. Simple lenses are not corrected for different colours, so colour fringing can happen. Specifically, highlights in an image are blurred, but the bokeh effects of soft focus cannot be reproduced. It can also be approximated with post-processing procedures. The latter is less recommended because successive cleaning always introduces a risk to damage the lens's surface. The effect of a soft focus lens is sometimes approximated by the use of diffusion filter or other method, such as stretching a nylon stocking over the front of the lens, or smearing petroleum jelly on a clear filter or on the front element or even the back element of the lens itself. The soft focus effect is used as an effect for glamour photography, because the effect eliminates blemishes, and in general produces a dream-like image. A lens from the original series can fetch between $3,000 and $8,000, depending on condition. In 2017, a new version was produced, costing $6,495. It was made in small numbers, no more than 3000 units. In the mid-1930s, Leitz designed a legendary soft-focus lens, the Thambar 90mm f2.2, for the Leica rangefinder cameras. ![]() The effect can be disabled entirely as well, in which case the lens is sharp. Newer lenses are optimized to minimize optical aberrations, but there are lenses such as the Canon EF 135mm lens f/2.8 with Softfocus, Pentax SMC 28mm f2.8 FA Soft Lens, Mamiya 180mm f/4.0 Soft Focus Lens for 645 Cameras, and the Lensbaby Velvet 56mm lens, which have adjustable levels of spherical aberration at wide apertures. Some lens makers, such as Pinkham-Smith and Busch Nicola Perscheid (see Nicola Perscheid), intentionally designed lenses to take advantage of these flaws and, as color became available, chromatic aberration was less desirable, but well-managed spherical aberration was desirable. ![]() A portrait taken with a Leica Thambar soft-focus lensīecause soft focus results from what are considered technical flaws, typically spherical and chromatic aberration, many older lenses had soft focus built in as a side effect of their construction. In front, left to right: Rear cap, special dot filter, lens shade, front cap. Photography Very rare Leica soft-focus Thambar lens from the 1930s with original leather case. Soft focus is also the name of the style of photograph produced by such a lens. A soft focus lens deliberately introduces spherical aberration in order to give the appearance of blurring the image while retaining sharp edges it is not the same as an out-of- focus image, and the effect cannot be achieved simply by defocusing a sharp lens. In photography, soft focus is a lens flaw, in which the lens forms images that are blurred due to spherical aberration. An image of the same bottle, but without soft focus.
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