An Unspectacular Video With A Spectacular Lens

[EdgarK]

While FPN was offline, I used the time to learn a bit more about ultrafast lenses, photography in general and filming

 

In photography, an ultrafast lens would typically have an f-stop at or below f/1.0. For the beginners: The lower the number, the more light can get into the lens. While this causes a shallow depth of field which can be very problematic (i.e. macro-photography), it can be very important for filming or just for aesthetic reasons. Stanley Kubricks film Barry Lyndon was basically only filmed in candle light (even if they modified the candles to have a brighter light) which lead to the requirement of an ultrafast lens. They used the Zeiss Planar f/0.7/50mm.

 

I was so fascinated of the look, that I finally bought an old Carl Zeiss Jena f/0.77/50 mm. It is very likely that this lens was produced at around 1966 and was originally used for X-ray machines:

 

(Click on the image for the video)

 

 

Since this lens simply was not made for cameras and there are no adapters available, it was not easy to use it on an ordinary camera. However, with the MFT system used in my Lumix G7 and a lot of dabbling I had success, since MFT has a relatively short flange distance:

 

 

I tried to make photos; but, to be honest: Nooooo, they are not so good I think. Not for that amount of effort. The only photo I like is this one, shot with a Nikon APS-C sensor (a bit larger than MFT). It is an unedited file:

 

 

I realized that this lens is way better for filming and so I decided to make a video. It was way harder than I expected and it is my first (and probably the last, I am more a photographer) video at all, but I think it is very interesting:

 

Video

(Click on the image for the video)

[EdgarK]

Uploaded on YouTube:

 

 

 

[Schaumburg_Swan]

 Hi,

 

very interesting experiment with such an exotic lens! 🙂

Do you know for what negative size and scale was it designed?

I'm asking because the macro photo of the nib shows less spherical aberrations than the close-up of the swan bottle.

Or does that just look that way with it's very little dof?

 

Best and thank you for presenting

Jens

 

 

[EdgarK]

Hi Jens,

 

thanks for your feedback!

 

Unfortunately information is very rar. According to my information it is likely that they have been used for the Röntgenfernsehkameras (X-ray television cameras) by VEB Studiotechnik Berlin. After some research I found out that on products by VEB Studiotechnik Berlin they used the RFT logo (see according Wikipedia article). And I suspect that this lens (0.77/50) was used on a (RFT) RFK-4010, while the RFK must refer to the German word "Röntgenfernsehkamera" (X-ray television camera).

 

However, I still cannot find much information, also ZEISS doesn't know much about it any more.

 

Anyhow, in the German Wikipedia article of VEB is a photo of such an X-ray device:

 

Author: Michael Fuchs (1980) | License: Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0)