Fuji Soft-Focus Lens

While looking for a Pentax 20 mm lens to use for Macro shot (use it with revers mount-ring

on Canon —– Canon’s 20 mm lens is too big and F-aperture couldn’t be set manually),

Then I bumped to 40 year old  Fuji Soft-focus 85 mm F4 lens, deep inside of camera cabinet.

Yah, yah, I’m still having this ! —– I remember, I used this lens twice = It is my bad habit to

buy strange Camera, Lens, funny devices whether I need to use it or not = still, to see how

it was designed or what sort of things could be created from such junk is,  I should say,

my pleasure. —– (Like £10 broken camera, it is a treasure box of spare-parts)

Any how, to test this lens, I popped out to take picture of  Chery Blossoms. (Yet again  😀 )

Most Soft focus Lens is using an optical aberration = Uncorrected Spherical Aberration, 

which cause the light spread out side of the image, hence giving soft halo around the image

while maintaining the sharply focused core image in the center.  (Though, having inherent

soft image in the view finder, to have sharp focus in the first place is not easy  😀 )

And as this Fuji Lens is using so-called Lotus-Root Iris (having lots of hole in a disc) to

control intensity of the effect, some time the artifact appears in the off-focused Boke image. 

In the photo above, you can see the ghost of multi-hole disc. = this is a sample of dirty Boke.

When soft effect works well, effect is far better than soft filter or grease, as the image has

solid core of focused image.   (With soft filter, everything become soft).

With darker background,  you can see how halo spread around the bright images.

Though, with low contrast subjects, the effect is subdued.  In fact, with smaller F setting,

the effect of aberration become very little, same as even a cheap bad lens can give sharp

image with small F-aperture setting.

These days,  even a Mob’Phone camera can take pretty sharp photos.   Sharp images with

over Photoshoped photos are everywhere, and I’ve got rather weary with them.

Our eyes are not necessary need to see everything in its details. That is why, when sharp-eyed

Photographer showed unknown view or fresh viewing angle, the image surprises us.

So, I found, soft images which shows [the details as if no details are there],  isn’t too bad.  😀

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