Musing: January 2011
Seeing the World Softly
This month you will see a new portfolio of soft focus images on the web site. This work is quite a change for me. Although Fredrick Evans was my earliest inspiration in photography, I emulated the work of modernists: Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and Minor White. In the beginning, I was an f/64 guy, using view cameras, making silver prints, and always seeking the sharpest lens available. Yet tucked away in the dark corners of my bookcases were books by a few Pictorialists: Alvin Langdon Coburn, F. Holland Day, and Laura Gilpin. Drawn to make platinum prints like Evans I gradually began to separate from the f/64 aesthetic, and eventually began to make only platinum prints. For the past eight years I have been working more frequently with soft focus lenses, discovering each of their strengths and weaknesses, and learning to take better advantage of the individual characteristics of each.
As I became more familiar with the “look” of these images, I began to discover more and more soft focus images mixed among the photographers of the f/64 group. My own education of this subject has been greatly enhanced by my friend, Russ Young, wrote his (PhD) thesis on these lenses and the image-makers who utilized them. Several years ago, learning to use my first soft focus lens, I made some awful images. To get a better handle on the situation I started to shoot many of my images with both a soft focus as well as a traditional lens. Eventually I began to see the different way the individual lenses “saw” and I began to recognize situations in which the use of the soft focus lens made the image I liked best. This experience gave me hope that (maybe) I was beginning to figure out this soft focus stuff. I even “slipped” one such image into Odin Stone and a few more in A Walk Along the Jordan.
Soft focus lenses were a late addition to the history of lens design. The sharpest of the lenses that we use today are based on research and designs from the late 19th century. Soft focus lenses were first created around the turn of the 20th century. Photographers asked lens designers to create a lens that gave a softer, rounder look, reacting “against the flood of unexceptional and easy photographs enabled by the technical advances of the 1880’s… innovations such as the dry plate hand held camera, flexible roll film, as well as improved camera design and optical sharpness made camera work available to a larger group of amateurs whose primary concern was the graphic recording of information.” (The Focal Encyclopedia of Photography, Zakia and Stroebel, 3rd edition, 1993.) Maybe I was beginning to react in a similar way.
Soft focus lenses work in two ways, by chromatic and/or spherical aberrations. Some lenses use both and some use one or the other. There are some specific qualities to soft focus lenses. They are always either of a normal or a slightly longer focal length. There are no wide-angle soft focus lenses. All soft focus lenses are at their softest wide open and sharpen up as the lens is stopped down. The best soft focus images have a strong sense of definition of subject matter, but will often create a glow or halo around lighter area of the image. It is a different look than an image that is simply out of focus, or even an image with a lack of depth of field enough to delineate foreground and background. The subject is clearly identified and the background is less defined allowing the subject to standout from the chaos behind it.
Frederick Evans responded to a letter in which Coburn charged that he lacked imagination when it came to new ways of seeing and evolving personal vision: “Mr. Coburn mistakes… my attitudes towards cathedral photography if he imagines I am content with retreading the same old ground in the same old way. If I were younger and deeper in pocket, I would start afresh and take cathedrals new to me (Spain for choice) and abandon my hard and fast anastigmats and work with soft-focus lenses for their pencil like round edge effects. I believe a wholly new joy in architectural photography is possible here, seeking mainly for the fully lighted and richly shadowed effects. The imagination I am accused of not being cursed (blessed?) with rises in ecstatic joy at the mere thought of these unexplored fields of sane art… Let me commend this new work to the younger generation, who prefer good work to mere publicity.” (British Journal of Photography, March 23, 1917, p. 155; as quoted in Frederick Evans, Beaumont Newhall, An Aperture Monograph, U.S., 1973.)
Perhaps I am getting softer in my outlook as I add to my own new ways of seeing. I hope you enjoy this new portfolio and the images I will add in the future.
All the best,
Tillman