Pictures taken with it have that classic look- sharp with excellent contrast, creamy bokeh, and that indefinable luminous quality. 100mm f/3.5 Canon or Serenar This exceptional 5-element, 4-group medium telephoto Leica /Canon screw-mount lens was first offered under the Serenar name in silver finish, in 1953, and later under the official company name, Canon, in black and silver, in 1958. It’s sharp wide open, especially near the center of the frame, has superb creamy bokeh, and is a great lens for portraiture in crop-sensor or Micro Four Thirds System cameras, where it provides a medium telephoto effective focal length.ħ. 58mm f/2 Carl Zeiss Jena Biotar Dating back to the 1930s in uncoated form, this long-running, 6-element, 4-group Gauss formula lens, made by the former East German branch of Zeiss, is typically found in an Exakta or M42 screw mount. It has a floating rear element to suppress distortion, is a superlative choice for portraiture, still life, or nature, and can focus down to 1:5 for stunning close-ups.Ħ. It delivers outstanding sharpness, even wide open, impressive color accuracy, and buttery smooth bokeh. 100mm f/2 Olympus OM Zuiko Auto-T Introduced along with the multi-spot-metering Olympus OM-4, in 1983, this 7-element, 6-group classic is one of the few Olympus lenses of its era to incorporate ED glass. If bokeh is more important to you than sharpness at wide apertures, consider the more common (and less costly) non-L version of the Canon FD 50mm f/1.2.ĥ. The downside: mediocre background bokeh at common shooting distances, a common problem with aspheric element lenses. Produced from 1980-1988, it’s prized for its sharpness and contrast at all apertures and over its entire focusing range, down to 18 inches, and it’s great for low-light work. Canon FD 50mm f/1.2 L Identifiable by the L on its identification ring, and a red band in front of its focusing ring, this superb 8-element 6-group multicoated super-speed normal lens incorporates one aspheric element and a floating-element design to achieve exceptional performance, even wide open. A new version of this lens re-introduced in 2013 is available new and, thankfully, they haven’t “improved” it.Ĥ. It’s not very sharp wide open, but it delivers the much sought-after “swirly bokeh,” with backgrounds like trees and flowers, and it’s quite sharp stopped down. 85mm f/1.5 Helios-40-2 Made in Russia, from the mid-1950s to the ’90s, this ponderous 6-element Double Gauss lens is said to be based on Zeiss Biotar design, and it’s usually found in an M42 (Pentax/Practica) mount in black finish and manual (pre-set) aperture configuration. My version is sharp in the center, but quite soft at the edges at f/2, surprisingly sharp overall at f/5.6 on down, renders moderate-contrast images with that classic “roundness,” and produces gorgeous bokeh.ģ. 50mm f/2 Leitz Summar (uncoated) The first “super-speed” f/2 normal lens for screw-mount Leicas, Leitz turned out 127,950 of these collapsible 6-element, 4-group beauties, from 1933-40. This Topcon/Exakata mount lens is most commonly seen in chrome, but was also available in black finish.Ģ. It also provides a bright 1:1 viewing image and focuses to a tad under 18 inches for compelling close-ups. Indeed, the lens is acclaimed as a “bokeh king” and prized for its beautiful natural rendition of portrait and scenic subjects. All of them deliver outstanding sharpness wide open, but bokeh improves noticeably by stopping down to f/2 and smaller apertures. Auto-Topcor) This amazing 7-element 5-group double-Gauss-formula lens, based on the Zeiss Planar, was produced in several versions, from about 1963 to 1980. Canon F/1 with 50mm f/1.4 Canon FD f/2 12 Great Vintage Lenses for Capturing Classic Imagesġ. While we still rely on objective testing to determine the sharpness, detail, and contrast performance of a lens, many art and creative photographers are focused on making images that capture a traditional look that sets their work apart.Ībove image: Coffee House Portrait. Over the past 20 years or so, we’ve swung back to using more subjective terms such as bokeh to describe the visual appearance of the out-of-focus areas of the image. But by the Mid-20th Century, most optical scientists had dismissed such terms as imprecise and speculative, turning to resolution and, later, MTF testing to quantify lens-performance parameters. Back in the day, writers tried to express these qualities by referring to the “rounded,” “luminous,” or “plastic” rendition of a specific lens. In other words, they render subjects like portraits and landscapes in a distinctive and appealing way that can’t quite be conveyed in words. Why mount classic lenses on your digital camera? Because they have character! As many of today’s creative digital shooters have discovered, some of the great old lenses of the analog era can capture images that have that elusive quality known as character.
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