Caon 135mm soft lens

[DaveG]

Does anyone know if the Canon 135mm soft lens has full time manual focusing, as well as AF? It has a funny Auto Focus actuator as well called AFD, and I'm not familiar with this at all.

Any comments?

[rdenney]

Does anyone know if the Canon 135mm soft lens has full time manual focusing, as well as AF? It has a funny Auto Focus actuator as well called AFD, and I'm not familiar with this at all.

Any comments?

Mine does not have full-time manual focusing. Nor is it quick and silent like the lenses with ring USM. I haven't noticed that it's any different in focusing than any other non-USM lens.

Perhaps AFD was a forerunner to USM?

I have to say that I'm not terribly impressed with this lens. It's quite sharp, but the bokeh is only so-so and the soft-focus effect is, for me, unstatisfying. It's also quite difficult to evaluate the soft focus on the LCD screen or the viewfinder, for some reason that I haven't figured out. I'll crank in more, thinking I need to based on what I see in and through the camera, only to find that I already had too much when I view it on a proper monitor.

I would think of it as a plain, non-USM 135/2.8 with reasonably good optics. I would NOT think of it as an effective soft-focus lens, or as a specialty portrait lens which is why I bought it. I bought mine out of a used case at a camera store and spent accordingly, so I'm not really disappointed. But I would be if I'd paid full price with hopes for having a really effective long portrait lens.

Based on another thread, I just snagged a Zeiss Jena 135/3.5 off ebay. Even without autofocus, this lens will greatly outperform the Canon lens as a specialty portrait lens. If I want soft focus, I'll put a Zeiss Softar on it, and I'll still have spent considerably less than what I paid for the used Canon.

Rick "who thinks the soft focus effect, like the bokeh, is muddy on this lens" Denney

[cactusclay]

Humm, how much was the Jenna?

[rdenney]

Humm, how much was the Jenna?

I paid $80 for it, plus $12 shipping. I already own the M42 adaptor, which is about $30. It's not really the perfect general-purpose 135, because it won't have an auto aperture or auto focus. But for a specialty long portrait lens used wide open, it should do nicely.

Rick "who thinks a Softar would exceed the cost of both" Denney

[Mike H]

... Perhaps AFD was a forerunner to USM?


Yes, Arc Form Drive came before USM. It's a bit noisy and jumpy by comparison, but it gets you there (usually).

Mike H

[Huckaback Photo]

Dont forget with this lens there are 2 ways of adjusting the amount of soft focus.
1 using the slide switch on the lens barrel.
2 selecting various appertures.

I have used this lens for many years now and with and without soft focus switched in I have allways been pleased with results.
as for knowing what effect you can get, my advice would be to test at various settings and make some notes, getting to know how a particular lens performs is all part of the fun with photography
at least today we can view instantly and without the cost of film & processing.

Martin (Huckaback Photo)

[rdenney]

at least today we can view instantly and without the cost of film & processing.

That was my beef. I couldn't tell on the LCD whether there was much of the effect or not. And in the viewfinder the soft-focus effect just didn't appear. I think it must be some interaction between the fresnel on the ground glass and the spherical aberration that the soft-focus dials in. It wasn't until I was looking on a proper monitor that I could tell. In the field, that's quite as troublesome as processing film.

I was aware that both aperture and setting controlled the effect. I just kept going in the wrong direction based on what I was seeing. What's the point of an SLR if you can't see what the lens is doing? I can see the effect of a Softar, right on the ground glass.

But even when I didn't overdo the effect, I didn't really like the way the image looked. The effect I saw was that the highlights thickly spilled over onto the shadows, leaving a well-defined band of gray around the highlights. Small highlight areas were not spread as much, so it has the effect of turning big areas of highlights into a smear, while darker areas don't seem as soft. It's quite unnatural looking to me.

In fact, I have some images I've played with. The first image is the 135, with some soft-focus dialed in (I didn't record how much, unfortunately--and I shot these a couple of years ago). The second image was the next frame in the camera, which I shot with the soft focus turned off. Then, I took it into Photoshop, made a duplicated background layer, did a gaussian blur with 100 or so pixels (in the original high-res image) on the duplicate later, and set the layer transparency to 75%. The sharpness of the underlying image came through, but the soft-focus effect was more even across the image. Also, the blur didn't seem to just spill from the highlights to the shadows, but to be even on both sides of the edge. The effect is more ethereal and more like what I wanted. It's actually much more softening that what the lens provided, but the lens still did too much in highlight areas and not enough in relatively dark areas.

A Softar filter has little spherical bumps on flat filter glass. The flat filter between the bumps lays down a basically sharp image, while the bumps scatter light around it. It's more like the second image.

It's a purely aesthetic thing--it's just not what I wanted.

Rick "who realizes this is a matter of subjective taste" Denney