Saturday December 27, 2014

WARREN CONNECTICUT – I’m continuing to shoot with my antique Carl Zeiss 50mm lens, which stopped down is excellent for landscape and wide open has a lovely signature for portraits or just about anything else. Paraphrasing myself from a few years back my research indicates that the optical cell (the optical workings of the lens) was produced at the Carl Zeiss works in Jena, Germany in December 1945. So it actually is a Zeiss Jena 5cm f1.5 Sonnar. The lens cell was subsequently fitted to a Leica screw mount body by an unknown third party, probably in Germany, the UK or US, for sale in the UK or US. The distance scale is denominated in feet and Zeiss itself didn’t make any lenses in Leica mounts as Leica was a competitor (Zeiss and Leica were the equivalent of Nikon and Canon today). I can see why it would have been worth the trouble to convert this lens to a Leica mount: it is actually the equivalent of an modern lens in most respects at f4 and beyond – its performance is simply breathtaking and as noted above it has a lovely signature.

Day 1,899 of one photograph every day for the rest of my life.

On this day last year (day 1,534): Cemetery, New Preston CT.