I love the line in the film “The Outlaw Josey Wales,” when Chief Dan George takes a piece of colored candy from his pocket and says to Clint Eastwood, “All I have is a piece of hard rock candy. But it's not for eating. It's just for looking through.” That’s what lenses are all about, looking through. Many cheap lenses have all kinds of aberration and faults that make them painful to look through.
I do my best to avoid these kind of uncontrolled lens aberrations. I have spent years seeking out better and better-corrected lenses, what are called apochromatic (APO) lenses, where as much of the distortion and aberrations have been removed as possible, leaving what could be characterized as a pure transparency, just a clear medium that we can see through. But here is the ironic part.
When we finally refine our apochromatic lenses until nothing impedes their transparency, I find that something of great value is missing or has been lost in some of those lenses. Like the trace elements in sea salt that the body so desperately needs, something similar happens in fine lenses. What I call a “forensic” lens, a lens that is absolutely flat and actually copies whatever it sees (a “relay lens”), has little of interest to relay.
I am putting aside for this discussion the artistry of the photographer who can make almost any lens dance. Here I would like just to discuss the lenses themselves.
In the last analysis, when we have removed all defects, all aberrations, distortions, etc., we end up with a relay or copy lens. What you see is what you get. It is at that point that I find that certain imperfections in the lens themselves may have meaning and use, if they can be controlled. Oddly enough, I am reminded of my first real-life or dharma teacher, an 81-year-old man who was a traveling initiator into a Rosicrucian order, who had the little finger of one hand permanently slightly bent. He would say to me that this imperfection was all that there was keeping him in this world.
Of course, I had no idea what he meant, but it could be something like I am describing here with lenses, that when all is said and done (as for correcting a lens), that the best lenses have some remaining twist, differential, or “fault” that allows us to see through them into a world that is not simply a copy of what we ordinarily see, not just a relay lens. Instead, that ever-so-slight defect is what gives a lens character and makes it different or special from what I label as a pure copy or forensic lens. I am asking about lens character.
I have struggled to find highly-corrected APO lenses, lenses free and clear of all distortions, etc., only to find that with the vanishing aberrations sometimes go the very thing that led me on in my search for clarity-in-lenses in the first place. What kind of Catch-22 is that? And what kind of life-message is that? For me, it is a particularly profound one.
I have assembled scores of lenses that can be used for close-up and macro (or micro) photography. Some are more corrected than others. The best are apochromatic to one degree or another of refinement. The worst, the least-corrected lenses, cast color-fringing that destroys the “sharpness” of that particular lens. I have few of those kinds of lenses left in my collection and never use them.
When I look into the “best of the best” apochromatic lenses, as I mentioned, I find ones that are extremely flat and very clear. You would think that was enough, the sheer transparency and clarity, a lens that transmits a perfect copy of the world out there. Yet, oddly enough, this kind of “copy lens,” what I call a “forensic lens,” is not satisfying to me.
It appears that along with the vanishing aberrations as we correct a lens, often goes that differential or angle of interest that has led me on all this time in my search for marvelous lenses. I admit that this is hard to explain or put into words. Some of you will know what I am talking about here and can comment in your own words.
It is the defects in life that make it challenging, that slow me down (brings me down) into actual experience, something that for a “thinker” like myself I tend to avoid. In a similar way, I am finding that in the last analysis, in the last judgment, so to speak (the most recent, anyway), I am sorting out APO lenses into two groups. On the one hand are those that are essentially relay lenses, copy lenses, free of almost everything but their own transparency, and on the other hand are those lenses that have some small (but to me beautiful) defects remaining that ever-so-slightly alter the image so that what I see through that lens takes me out of the pure copy-world I am so familiar with and puts me into an altered space where I somehow see beyond the ordinary.
I know that many of you reading this will say that I am overthinking things, but am I? An example would be the El Nikkor APO 105mm f/5.6 enlarger lens. It is absolutely highly corrected, not only in the entire visible spectrum, but even beyond both ends of that spectrum and into the near infrared and near ultra-violet. Yet, and here is my point, this lens has a distinct character or draw.
Perhaps when we correct any lens, when we distill it down, removing (or controlling) all the aberrations, etc., what is left is some “distillate,” some trace effects that become what we call the character of that particular lens. Perhaps this is what that elusive term “micro-contrast” is all about. And perhaps some APO lenses have very little trace-character to them or a trace-character that does not satisfy us in some way that we require. I can’t say for certain.
Then there are lenses like the CRT Nikkor-O, a lens that makes no pretense in terms of being highly corrected, but nevertheless is very fast (f/1.2) and has high resolution, but at the same time has admirable defects that are almost unpredictable, but so lovely.
So, for me at least, the bottom-line here is that I have run the gamut of most of the APO lenses I can find to fit the Nikon F-mount and have begun to modify my previous desire to find the “Holy Grail” of APO lenses, which has now morphed into: I want highly-corrected APO lenses that, nevertheless, have a distinct character or distillate that projects me beyond the obvious ordinary into the extra-ordinary. In other words, the extraordinary only can be found through the lens with a touch of the ordinary, some beautiful defects.
This article is not meant so much as a statement, as it is a question. What are your thoughts about this, for me at least, dilemma?
[Photo taken with the Voigtlander 125mm APO-Lanthar f/2.5]
