Shooting with a Petzval lens

- Imagine it's the year 1550, and you're living somewhere fairly cosmopolitan. Say, Florence, Italy. You know, since this is a fantasy, there's no reason not to go first class. So let's say you live in a lovely sun dappled villa on the edge of town in the Tuscan countryside. It's a nice summer day and you've got an afternoon to kill. So, you summon your carriage driver and your money bearer and you take a trip into town to hit the marketplace. Haggling your way from merchant to merchant in a bustling bazaar, you procure some eggs, salt, soda, and gun cotton.

Gun cotton is a flammable cellulose material that's made using nitric acid. You move on, from the local apothecary you purchase some sulfur dioxide and powdered sulfur, as well sulfuric and nitric acids. A blacksmith sells you iron while the local glazier is happy to cut you a deal on some glass. Back at home you have the estate carpenter. Alright, maybe this is a larger villa than you initially realized. Anyway, you have him fetch you some wood, black paint, and nails, while you venture to the kitchen to get a sterling silver spoon.

In the 1500s, all of these things were available and with them you can build a working camera and photosensitive plates. Everything necessary for the invention of photography was available in the 16th century, but no one knew to put those bits together in the right way. If they had known, we would have photos of the Aztec empire, Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel, the first production of Hamlet, Beethoven conducting, I don't know, all the history that has come since then and those are just the things I can think of from a white Eurocentric perspective.

But, no one did know how to build a camera then or even to conceive of one. The concept of a machine for capturing images is a fairly radical idea. Now we take it for granted, that there should be a way to capture light. But, the very idea of light as a capturable quantity is itself a pretty radical notion. In the 16th century people weren't yet thinking of the phenomena that feed our senses as manipulative media. During the Renaissance, there was a sizable interest in automota. A lot of engineers and craftsmen spent a lot of time constructing complex mechanisms that could mimic different human activities.

Automota were built which were could play the violin or even draw pictures. I've always thought it interesting that to record the sound of a violin, inventors thought they had to create a machine that could play an actual violin. The idea of recording sound itself was a leap that they hadn't made. Around 1800, a Swiss inventor named Henri Maillardet built an automaton which can draw four pictures and write out three different poems. This was a viable mechanism for recording imagery. As long as the imagery you wanted was one of the four particular line drawings he had built into the machine.

And I love that these inventors felt that they had to make their creations look human. How did he decide on her hair color? Curiously, one of the players in the development of photography, an Englishman named William Henry Fox Talbot began experimenting with methods of recording light because he found himself frustrated by his inability to draw. He and his relatives would vacation on Lake Como in Italy and while other family members were off making lovely sketches of the environment, he simply found himself frustrated by his inability to craft good results. He of course would not think of building an automaton that could draw when he couldn't draw himself.

There are many important figures in the development of photography who all contributed to where we are now. Fox Talbot is just one of several who were working with chemical processes of recording light onto paper. He created a process called calotype and made a number of images which he collected into a book called curiously enough, The Pencil of Nature, which is how he described light. He went on to develop the silver based positive negative process that we are now familiar with on film. Simply crafting a mechanism for recording light is not enough though, you need a way to focus that light onto your light sensitive medium.

The science of optics was in its infancy when photography was getting started. You had spyglasses and simple telescopes and eyeglasses, even bifocals, but early lenses lacked even the basic level of craftsmanship that we're used to today. These lenses weren't for example necessarily designed to cover the specific size of the focal plane of a particular camera. That changed in 1840 when a Hungarian mathematician named Joseph Petzval designed the first lens with multiple elements that was actually designed rather than assembled through trial and error.

When Petzval, then a mathematics professor at the University of Vienna, heard about the daguerreotype, an early photographic process that quickly swept the world, he realized that the typical three element lenses used in most cameras of the time could be improved upon by actually paying attention to the refractive indexes of the lens elements used and engineering the curvature of those elements to achieve particular results. To do this, Petzval concocted some gnarly equations as well as a mathematical rule which still bears his name. The calculations required to solve the equations took months, so in an early example of crowd sourcing Petzval sped up the process by contracting some of the mathematical grunt work to the Austrian Army.

Turns out that the army kept a small coterie of good enough mathematicians around. They were used to calculate things like cannonball trajectories and those guys became Petzval's human computer. Most lenses of the day were slow, they were wide open at F16. By comparison, Petzval's lens had a maximum aperture of F3.6 to 3.7. This was a huge advance. Given the slow speeds of the the photosensitvie plates of the day, Petzval's lens allowed an immediate increase in shutter speed from 20 minutes to under one minute.

For portrait shooting that was a phenomenal boon. Petzval died, destitute in Vienna in 1891. He was largely forgotten by that time and fairly bitter because of it. But, the Petzval lens lives on today, thanks to a company called Lomography that is now selling a replica Petzval lens with either a Canon or Nikon bayonet mount on it. These lenses come in somewhere between $500 and $600 depending on where you buy them and they are a fascinating relic that you can actually get your hands on and play with.

This is an 85 millimeter lens. I don't know the focal length of the original Petzval lens and they may have come in different lenses. This is an F2.2, so it's much faster than the Petzval lens and I expect it's higher quality than what you would've seen from a Petzval lens because we do have modern manufacturing techniques for manufacturing lens elements. That said, it's got a very primitive look to it, a very archaic look to it. What's mostly distinctive about it in addition to the very shallow depth of field is this swirly stuff you can get in backgrounds.

It de-focuses in a way that seems different to me than a wide aperture on a fast lens of modern design. It's a lot of fun to play with. It's manual focus only. It's also very heavy, this brass case is not light. You can see the focus ring right here and it doesn't have a lot of travel in it, so very fine motions get you a very different sense of focus or a very extreme amount of focus. It's got this shutter up here that you can take out, if you actually want to put it on a very old camera, you know, a very old camera with a Canon or Nikon mount.

I'm running it off my Fuji here, through a simple Canon to Fuji lens adapter. This thing was only $20. It doesn't need any electronics in it because there are no electronics in the lens. I would recommend checking one of these out for a couple of reasons. It's not going to become and everyday lens, especially if you're a sports shooter. But, it's interesting to get a feel for this gear in your hands. To feel the weight, to feel the all metal brass lens, to feel what a focusing mechanism might have been like of the day. It gives you a real appreciation for possibly, what some of the technical limitations that a Victorian photographer had.

But, it also gives you something else. This look that we're seeing in these images, we see a lot of this kind of look achieved now on Instagram and through phone applications like Hipstamatic, this archaic look, and they're achieved by post processing the image. You could certainly create a Petzval look in Photoshop with no problem at all. But, if you're shooting with Instagram on your phone or shooting with Hipstamatic on your phone, you're shooting JPEGs. I'm shooting raw images with this. So I'm working with this archaic lens, but all of the modern advantages of raw photography, highlight recovery, white balance recovery, full bit depth, I can really push my adjustments a long way.

I'm also getting this cool swirly, diffused background like I could get from a filter. But, this isn't really an analog process. It's difficult to predict what it's going to do. It's difficult to predict how it's going to blow out a specular highlight or something. So this is an analog approach to that hip archaic digital process that a lot people achieve through filters, and because it's an analog approach, it's somewhat unpredictable. So again, this lens isn't cheap, but it's an interesting experiment to take, you might be able to find a rental version. I will say if you're going to buy one, I should tell you about my experience.

The lens came broken. I had to send it back right away and I couldn't use it at all, the focus mechanism was stuck, I didn't get it back for four months. And then the other day I noticed that there were some screws missing from it and the focus knob fell off. So Lomography still has some kinks to work out in their distribution experience. That is just anecdotal, I'm not saying that's a trend, I may have just gotten a lemon. All lens manufacturers have dud lenses from time to time. But, wherever you buy it from check into their return policy before you place your order because it may be that you want to send it back and get another copy if you've got the problems that I had.

Still, very interesting lens, very interesting way to experience some of the issues that photographers at the beginning faced.